Comparing Productivity Growth: An Exploration of French and U.S. Industrial and Firm Data

Zvi Griliches, Jacques Mairesse

NBER Working Paper No. 961
Issued in August 1982
NBER Program(s):   PR

This paper compares and analyzes the growth of productivity in the manufacturing industries and firms in France and the U.S. based on newly assembled comparable data sets in both countries. Three explanations of the recent productivity slowdown are reviewed: shortfall in physical investment, rise in materials prices, and a decline in the intensity or fecundity of R&D investment, and found not to bear on the differences in productivity growth between and within the two countries, either at the industry or the firm levels.

(416 K)

Published:

• Griliches, Zvi and Jacques Mairesse. "Comparing Productivity Growth: An Exploration of French and U.S. Industrial and Firm Data." European Economic Review, Vol. 21, Vol. 1/2. North Holland Publishing Company. (March/April 1983), pp. 89-119. ,
• Griliches, Zvi and Jacques Mairesse. "Comparing Productivity Growth: An Exploration of French and U.S. Industrial and Firm Data." International Volatility and Economic Growth: The First Ten Years of the International Seminar on Macroeconomics, edited by Georges de Menil and Robert J. Gordon, North Holland Publishing Co. (1991), pp. 45-82. ,
• Griliches, Zvi. "Comparing Productivity Growth: An Exploration of French and U.S. Industrial and Firm Data." R&D and Productivity: The Econometric Evidence, by Zvi Griliches, Chicago: UCP, (1998), pp. 157 - 186. ,
• Comparing Productivity Growth: An Exploration of French and U.S. Industrial and Firm Data, Zvi Griliches, Jacques Mairesse, in International Volatility and Economic Growth: The First Ten Years of The International Seminar on Macroeconomics, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., 1991
  This paper was subsequently published as Comparing Productivity Growth: An Exploration of French and U.S. Industrial and Firm Data, Zvi Griliches, in R&D and Productivity: The Econometric Evidence (1998), University of Chicago Press
  

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