O47

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively associated with economic growth.

Structural vector-autoregressions with long-run restrictions are extraordinarily sensitive to low-frequency correlations. This paper explores this sensitivity analytically and via simulations, focusing on the contentious issue of whether hours worked rise or fall when technology improves.

This paper studies procyclical productivity growth at the industry level in the U.S. and in three European countries (France, Germany and the Netherlands). Industry-specific demand-side instruments are used to examine the prevalence of non-constant returns to scale and unmeasured input utilization. For the aggregate U.S.

Composition of the euro area workforce evolves over time and in response to changing labour market conditions. We construct an estimate of growth in euro area labour quality over the period 1983-2004 and show that labour quality has grown on average by 0.6% year-on-year over this time period. Labour quality growth was significantly higher in the early 1990s than in the 1980s.