For years William Gould has argued for labor law reform that would facilitate trade union organization and collective bargaining. In the face of increased erosion in worker protection and weakening of the collective bargaining process, Gould proposes an agenda of reforms to balance the interests...

It is often assumed that recent success in the high-technology software industry will lead India's development. However, evidence suggest that basic manufacturing industry is stagnant. This paper proposes a mechanism that ties these two trends together. A big-push type of model, featuring...

While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google's ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms and industries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and...

Since the mid 1990s labor productivity growth in Sweden has been high compared to Japan, the US and the western EU-countries. While productivity growth has been rapid in manufacturing, it has been much slower in the service sector. Paradoxically, all employment growth since the mid 1990s has...

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Traditional growth theory emphasizes the incentives for capital accumulation rather than technological progress. Innovation is treated as an exogenous process or a by-product of investment in machinery and equipment. Grossman and Helpman develop a unique approach in which innovation is viewed as...

The economic importance of innovative activity brings with it an active debate on the effect of public policy on the innovation process. This annual series, sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, brings the work of leading academic researchers to the broader policy community,...

How can American manufacturing recapture its former dominance in the globalized industrial economy? In Worker Leadership, Fred Stahl proposes a strategy to boost enterprise productivity and restore America’s industrial power. Stahl outlines a revolutionary transformation of industrial culture...

In 1977, a grain elevator explosion in Westwego, Louisiana, took the lives of thirty-five workers. The next year, fifty-one men who were working on cooling tower for a West Viginia power plant died when their support scaffolding collapsed. And more recently, a Senate subcommittee hearing...