This economic, social and cultural analysis of the nature and variety of production and consumption activities in households in Kent and Cornwall yields important new insights on the transition to ...capitalism in England.
ROBOTS AT WORK Graetz, Georg; Michaels, Guy
The review of economics and statistics,
12/2018, Volume:
100, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We analyze for the first time the economic contributions of modern industrial robots, which are flexible, versatile, and autonomous machines. We use novel panel data on robot adoption within ...industries in seventeen countries from 1993 to 2007 and new instrumental variables that rely on robots’ comparative advantage in specific tasks. Our findings suggest that increased robot use contributed approximately 0.36 percentage points to annual labor productivity growth, while at the same time raising total factor productivity and lowering output prices. Our estimates also suggest that robots did not significantly reduce total employment, although they did reduce low-skilled workers’ employment share.
El presente artículo estima la productividad total de los factores (PTF) para Colombia, aplicando el modelo Solow-Swan ampliado en el período 1950-2017, a partir de un análisis de cointegración y un ...vector de corrección de errores (VEC). Los resultados evidencian que la PTF para el período de estudio es del 0.13 %; finalmente, se tiene que la PTF no explica el proceso de crecimiento en Colombia tomando en consideración un modelo neoclásico.
Robots and Firms Koch, Michael; Manuylov, Ilya; Smolka, Marcel
The Economic journal (London),
08/2021, Volume:
131, Issue:
638
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Abstract
We study the microeconomic implications of robot adoption using a rich panel data set of Spanish manufacturing firms over a 27-year period (1990–2016). We provide causal evidence on two ...central questions: (1) Which firm characteristics prompt firms to adopt robots? (2) What is the impact of robots on adopting firms relative to non-adopting firms? To address these questions, we look at our data through the lens of recent attempts in the literature to formalise the implications of robot technology. As for the first question, we establish robust evidence for positive selection, i.e., ex ante better performing firms (measured through output and labour productivity) are more likely to adopt robots. On the other hand, conditional on size, ex ante more skill-intensive firms are less likely to do so. As for the second question, we find that robot adoption generates substantial output gains in the vicinity of 20–25% within four years, reduces the labour cost share by 5–7% points, and leads to net job creation at a rate of 10%. These results are robust to controlling for non-random selection into robot adoption through a difference-in-differences approach combined with a propensity score reweighting estimator. To further validate these results, we also offer structural estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) where robot technology enters the (endogenous) productivity process of firms. The results demonstrate a positive causal effect of robots on productivity as well as a complementarity between robots and exporting in boosting productivity.
Since the mid-1990s, labor productivity growth in Europe has significantly slowed compared to earlier decades. In contrast, labor productivity growth in the United States accelerated, so that a new ...productivity gap has opened up. This paper shows that this development is attributable to the slower emergence of the knowledge economy in Europe. We consider various explanations which are not mutually exclusive. These include lower growth contributions from investment in information and communication technology; the small share of information and communications technology–producing industries in Europe; and slower multifactor productivity growth, which proxies for advances in technology and innovation. Underlying these are issues related to the functioning of European labor markets and the high level of product market regulation in Europe. The paper emphasizes the key role of market service sectors in accounting for the productivity growth divergence between the two regions. We argue that improved productivity growth in Europe's market services will be needed to avoid a further widening of the productivity gap.
We investigate the role of sectoral labor productivity in explaining the process of structural transformation—the secular reallocation of labor across sectors—and the time path of aggregate ...productivity across countries. We measure sectoral labor productivity across countries using a model of the structural transformation. Productivity differences across countries are large in agriculture and services and smaller in manufacturing. Over time, productivity gaps have been substantially reduced in agriculture and industry but not nearly as much in services. These sectoral productivity patterns generate implications in the model that are broadly consistent with the cross-country data. We find that productivity catch-up in industry explains about 50% of the gains in aggregate productivity across countries, whereas low productivity in services and the lack of catch-up explain all the experiences of slowdown, stagnation, and decline observed across countries.
This study proposes an index for measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth which appropriately considers the nature of technical change. The rationale of this methodology is to exclude ...a spurious technical regress from the macroeconomic perspective. In order to incorporate this in developing the index, a directional distance function and the concept of the successive sequential production possibility set are combined. With this combination, the conventional Malmquist–Luenberger productivity index is modified to give the sequential Malmquist–Luenberger productivity index. This index is employed in measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth and its decomposed components of 26 OECD countries for the period 1970–2003.We distinguish two main empirical findings. First, even though the components of the conventional Malmquist–Luenberger productivity index and the proposed index are different, the trends of rates of average productivity growth are similar. Second, unlike in previous studies, the efficiency change is the main contributor to the earlier study period, whereas the effect of technical change has prevailed over time.
► To provide an environmentally sensitive productivity growth index by considering the progressive nature of technologies. ► To find environmentally productive and efficient countries? ► To find environmentally innovative countries?
We propose an extension of the Olley and Pokes (1996) productivity decomposition that accounts for the contributions of surviving, entering, and exiting firms to aggregate productivity changes. We ...argue that the other decompositions that break down aggregate productivity changes into similar components introduce some biases in the measurement of the contributions of entry and exit. We apply our proposed decomposition to Slovenian manufacturing data and contrast our results with those of other decompositions. We find that, over a five-year period, the measurement bias associated with entry and exit is substantial, accounting for up to 10 percentage points of aggregate productivity growth.
New dinoflagellate cyst (dinocyst) analyses were carried out at high resolution in core MD99-2339, retrieved from a contouritic field in the central part of the Gulf of Cadiz, for the Marine Isotope ...Stage (MIS) 3 interval, allowing for discussion of palaeohydrological changes over the last 50ky in the subtropical NE Atlantic Ocean. Some index dinocyst taxa, according to their (palaeo)ecological significance, shed light on significant sea-surface changes. Superimposed on the general decreasing pattern of dinocyst export to the seafloor over the last 50ky, paralleling the general context of decreasing aeolian dust fertilization, a complex variability in dinocyst assemblages was detected at the millennial timescale. Enhanced fluvial discharges occurred during Greenland Interstadials (GIs), especially GI 1, 8 and 12, while enhanced upwelling cell dynamics were suggested during the Last Glacial Maximum and Heinrich Stadials. Finally, during the early Holocene, and more specifically during the Sapropel 1 interval (around 7-9kaBP), we evidenced a strong decrease in dinocyst fluxes, which occurred synchronously to a strong reduction in Mediterranean Outflow Water strength and which we attributed to an advection of warm and nutrient-poor subtropical North Atlantic Central Waters. Over the last 50ky, our study thus allows for capturing and documenting the fine tuning existing between terrestrial and marine realms in North Atlantic subtropical latitudes, in response to not only the regional climate pattern but also monsoonal forcing interfering during precession-driven Northern Hemisphere insolation maxima. This mechanism, well expressed during the Holocene, is superimposed on the pervasive role of the obliquity as a first major trigger for explaining migration of dinocyst productive centres in the NE Atlantic margin to the subtropical (temperate) latitudes during glacial (interglacial) periods.
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