Essays on productivity: from micro to macro. : Essays on productivity: from micro to macro

Productivity growth is not everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. Understanding the origins of productivity growth is important because productivity matters in explaining welfare differences within and between countries. For the majority of countries, and especially in OECD countries, between 50% and 60% of the increase in output per worker can be attributed to productivity growth. Apart from a social welfare point of view, productivity is also relevant from a business point of view since productivity is strongly associated with profitability. Therefore, both the economics and business economics literature have a profound interest in understanding the determinants of productivity (growth). This PhD provides new insights in the determinants of Total Factor Productivity (growth) in Belgium. To estimate productivity, all chapters rely on state of the art semiparametric estimation techniques to avoid endogeneity biases in the estimation of production functions. The first chapter applies productivity decompositions to assess how recent recessions affected productivity growth in Belgian manufacturing and services industries. We show the contribution to productivity changes from labor reallocation, firm entry and firm exit. The second chapter exploits a novel dataset on information technology purchases by Belgian firms to quantify the returns on information technology and to validate how information technology contributed to productivity growth in Belgium. In the third chapter, we develop a novel decomposition to show how different types of innovation are related to differences in productivity and profitability in Belgian manufacturing firms. Altogether, this PhD pushes the state of the art in the literature by taking a micro-to-macro approach so that we can disentangle the heterogeneity in the estimated relations. The results from this PhD can be used to develop new policies for stimulating productivity growth in Belgium. status: published