Manchester School最新文献

We reassess the relationship between robotization and the growth in labor productivity with more recent data. We discover that the effect of robot density in the growth productivity substantially decreased in the post-2008 period. In this period, the lower positive effect of robot density in the growth of labor productivity is less dependent on the increase in value added. The data analysis dismisses any positive effect of robotization on hours worked. Results are confirmed by several robustness checks, cross-sectional (and panel-data) Instrumental Variable and quantile regression analysis. By means of the quantile regression analysis, we learn that the effect of robots on labor productivity is stronger for low productivity sectors and that in the most recent period, the effect of robotization felt significantly throughout the distribution. This highlights one of the possible sources of stagnation in the era of robotization and have implication both for labor market and R&D policies.

This paper contributes to the literature on how firms change their advertising strategies after a corporate scandal by providing both a theoretical model and an empirical evaluation based on the idea that advertising acts as a signal of the product quality that is modulated by the number of competing substitutes in the market. This result is new to the literature and helps to explain cases in which, possibly counter-intuitively, a firm affected by a corporate scandal may optimally decide to reduce its advertising expenditures, rather than increase it, in an attempt to restore its reputation as quickly as possible. We find empirical support for this result in the Volkswagen Group's response to the Dieselgate scandal.

Clusters in the developing world do, to a large extent, attract low-educated individuals, and these clusters are in some cases, characterized by urbanization without industrialization. This contrasts starkly to clusters in advanced economies that attract high-skilled individuals and entrepreneurs. In this paper, we develop a model of agglomeration and spatial sorting that is consistent with these two types of different agglomeration processes in developed and developing countries. We show that a poor country that has an agglomeration with low skilled individuals, may get stuck in this equilibrium, but that free mobility of human capital from the outset nevertheless is superior from the perspective of total social welfare.

We may be living at the dawn of a productivity revolution era brought about by modern science and technological improvements. The six research papers published in this special issue of The Manchester School, titled “Productivity Revolutions: Past and Future,” provide us with lessons on how economies and societies have dealt with the challenges posed by such revolutions.

Human productivity began increasing in the mid-19th century in a group of societies whose institutional structures simultaneously transformed. This paper develops a general way of thinking about institutional structures and identifies how specific institutional changes that occurred in the mid-19th century could have caused an increase in productivity across many of the organizations in a society. External rules enforced by one organization but used by other organizations, are central to the argument, as is the emergence of impersonal rules that apply equally to all citizens. The productivity revolution of the late 19th century occurred in an era when a few societies adopted impersonal rules on a broad scale for the first time in human history.

We compare the effects of price and quantity competition in an industry with complementary inputs, outsourcing and a vertically integrated firm where vertical integration occurs between a final goods producer and a subset of input suppliers. The profit of the integrated firm and the industry profit are higher under Bertrand competition, the profit of the non-integrated firm is higher under Bertrand competition for high product differentiation, and consumer surplus and welfare are higher under Bertrand competition for low product differentiation. Further, no market foreclosure can be the preferred choice of the vertically integrated firm for any degree of product differentiation.

We study the co-evolution of mental health with the most prominent risk factors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic for the Dutch working population. We exploit data from the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences panel from before the pandemic and five questionnaires in its first year. We find mental health decreased sharply with the onset of the first lockdown but recovered quickly, reaching levels comparable to those a year earlier. Labor market uncertainty, perceived infection risk, and loneliness are all associated with worsening mental health. Moreover, parents of children younger than 12 experience a significant drop in mental health.

The reallocation of resources between sectors is classically regarded as the engine of long-term growth. The different technological opportunities and the inherent levels of productivity that characterise each sector explain why changes in sectoral composition trigger development processes. Conversely, in the short run, productivity growth is associated with differentiation processes among firms operating in the same industry. The recent debate on the decline in Italian productivity has mainly focussed on short-term interpretations. Using a new dataset on the largest Italian companies between the 1970s and the 2010s period, the paper examines the role of structural change in determining productivity changes.

Worktime has been falling slowly though real wages have risen dramatically. We show that in a general equilibrium model with CES utility and production functions, worktime falls with real wages if and only if the elasticity of substitution between consumption and leisure is less than that between capital and labour, but always rises with labour's income share and concerns with relative income. While a falling labour share may not reduce worktime due to market inflexibility, stronger income comparison increases inefficient overwork. Hence, more flexibility, higher income taxes and a basic income are needed to reduce working hours and raise social welfare.

This study analyzes the interactions between population dynamics with differential fertility the intergenerational mobility and economic development. Population dynamics with differential fertility exerts the following two effects on the economy: (i) the change in the population size of the entire economy influences the mobility through changing in the composition of workers and (ii) the decreasing/increasing transfer per child influences the mobility. A sufficient increase in the population growth increases the population size and leads to a significant decline in the transfers per child; this phenomenon contributes toward the cyclical behavior of mobility and income inequality. On the other hand, when a population growth decreases, the mobility monotonically approaches toward steady state. These results are consistent with some empirical evidence. Hence, this study demonstrates that the population dynamics with differential fertility leads to a difference in transitional dynamics of intergenerational mobility and the process of economic development.