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This paper investigates procyclical productivity and attempts to discriminate among several competing explanations. The study focuses on the United States and Japan, since the different industrial relations in these two economies serve to cast a sharper light on the procyclical productivity debate. Labour hoarding, evaluated through the introduction of a labour utilization proxy, proves to be an important influence. The interpretation of the role of external economies remains an open issue.

Provides an overview of the real business cycle research agenda, tackling the main theoretical and empirical issues. Concludes that although this methodological approach has been popular in terms of the number of papers published, it has not been completely convincing in providing a theory of the business cycle.

Using industry data for the United States and the United Kingdom, we provide new evidence on the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) capital on real output growth. The traditional industry panel data analysis fails to find a positive contribution. We argue that this is due to heterogeneity across industries, particularly in the time dimension. Pooling the data for the two countries and using a dynamic panel data estimation method yield a positive and significant effect of ICT on output growth. Individual country estimates suggest a strong impact in the United States, while results are less conclusive in the United Kingdom.

In 1989 the UK began a process of transferring an almost wholly state-owned electricity supply industry (ESI) into a collection of privately-owned generation, transmission and distribution utilities. Using data from 1960–97, this paper aims to evaluate how the performance of the UK ESI has changed over time and to compare the UK performance with France, Germany and the United States in order to assess the impact of the liberalisation process. The study takes a whole-industry approach, combining the four aspects of electricity production — generation, transmission, distribution and supply. The computation of labour and total factor productivity and the impact on consumer prices are used to shed light on how successful the various industry structures have been in raising performance.

We investigate the decline of the labour share in a world characterized by increasing heterogeneity of capital assets. Our results show that over the 1970–2007 period, the decline of the labour share has been driven mainly by Information and Communication Technology assets and is mitigated by increasing investments in R&D‐based knowledge assets. Extending to other forms of intangible capital from 1995 onwards, we find that intangible investments related to innovation increase the labour share while those related to the organization of firms contribute to its decline, particularly for low‐ and intermediate‐skilled workers. Our results are robust to an array of econometric issues, namely heterogeneity, cross‐sectional dependence and endogeneity.

We investigate the causes of the decline in the labor share, exploring the effect of technology vis-à-vis the role of market regulations, namely employment protection legislation, product market regulation, and intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. Our results show that, in the long run, productivity upgrades and information and communication technology capital diffusion are major sources of the decline in the labor share. IPR protection is the only dimension of the institutional setting that affects (positively) the share of industry income accruing to labor. Our results also show that hysteresis characterizes the dynamics of the labor share in all countries. This further corroborates the idea that institutional differences are not the main source of variation in labor share movements, as the negative trend is common to countries with different regulatory settings.