A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Despite ongoing negotiations, consensus has not yet been reached on what action will be taken to combat global warming. A number of companies have looked beyond the current stalemate to see the prospect of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions not as a roadblock to growth and innovation but as a unique opportunity to increase profits and productivity. These "cool" companies understand the strategic importance of reducing heat-trapping emissions and have worked to cut their emissions by fifty percent or more. In the process, they have not only reduced their energy bill, but have increased their productivity, sometimes dramatically.
In Cool Companies, energy expert Joseph Romm describes the experiences of these remarkable firms, as he presents more than fifty case studies in which bottom line improvements have been achieved by improving processes, increasing energy efficiency, and adopting new technologies. Romm places efforts to reduce emissions in the context of proven corporate strategies, showing managers how they can build or retrofit their operations with the latest technologies to reduce emissions and achieve quick returns on the investment. Case studies explain:
- the concept of "lean production" and why systematic efforts to reduce emissions so often lead to productivity gains
- how changes in office and building design can significantly increase productivity, greatly compounding gains achieved from increased energy efficiency
- options for "cool" power -- from cogeneration to solar, wind, and geothermal energy
- energy efficiency in manufacturing, including motors and motor systems, steam, and process energy
In profiling successful companies such as DuPont, 3M, Compaq, Xerox, Toyota, Verifone, Perkin-Elmer, and Centerplex, among many others, Cool Companies turns on its head the notion that the effort to combat global warming will come with massive costs to the industrial sector. It is a unique and essential business book for anyone concerned with increasing profits and productivity while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
French trade unions played a historical role in the 1930s quite unlike that of any other labor movement. Against a backdrop of social unrest, parliamentary crisis, and impending world war, industrial unionists in the great metal-fabricating plants of the Paris Region carried out a series of street mobilizations, factory occupations, and general strikes that were virtually unique in Western history.
The unionization of the metal industry, following a series of anti-fascist demonstrations and plant seizures, would constitute the defining episode in modern French labor history and one of the great chapters in European social history. Yet little is known of these extraordinary events.
With a style that captures the vivid character of these experiences, Every Factory a Fortress tells the story of the Paris metal workers, who succeeded in organizing the largest Communist union in the Western world, reshaping the parameters of French social relations, and, ultimately, altering the course of French destinies.
Takatoshi Ito and Andrew K. Rose have organized a group of collaborators from several Asian countries, the United States, and other parts of the globe who ably balance both macroeconomic and microeconomic study with theoretical and empirical approaches. Growth and Productivity in East Asia gives special attention to the causes for the unusual success of Australia, one of the few nations to maintain unprecedented economic growth despite the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2001 global downturn. A new database comprising eighty-four Japanese sectors reveals new findings for the last thirty years of sectoral productivity and growth in Japan. Studies focusing on Indonesia, Taiwan, and Korea also consider productivity and its relationship to research and development, foreign ownership, and policy reform in such industries as manufacturing, automobile production, and information technology.
A New York Times Favorite Book of the Year for Healthy Living
A Fortune Best Book of the Year
An AIA New York Book of the Year
“This book should be essential reading for all who commission, design, manage, and use buildings—indeed anyone who is interested in a healthy environment.”
—Norman Foster
As schools and businesses around the world consider when and how to reopen their doors to fight COVID-19, the Director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program and Harvard Business School’s leading expert on urban resilience reveal what you can do to harness the power of your offices, homes, and schools to protect your health—and boost every aspect of your performance and well-being.
Ever feel tired during a meeting? That’s because most conference rooms are not bringing in enough fresh air. When that door opens, it literally breathes life back into the room. But there is a lot more acting on your body that you can’t feel or see. From our offices and homes to schools, hospitals, and restaurants, the indoor spaces where we work, learn, play, eat, and heal have an outsized impact on our performance and well-being. They affect our creativity, focus, and problem-solving ability and can make us sick—jeopardizing our future and dragging down profits in the process.
Charismatic pioneers of the healthy building movement who have paired up to combine the cutting-edge science of Harvard’s School of Public Health with the financial know-how of the Harvard Business School, Joseph Allen and John Macomber make a compelling case in this urgently needed book for why every business and home owner should make certain relatively low-cost investments a top priority. Grounded in exposure and risk science and relevant to anyone newly concerned about how their surroundings impact their health, Healthy Buildings can help you evaluate the impact of small, easily controllable environmental fluctuations on your immediate well-being and long-term reproductive and lung health. It shows how our indoor environment can have a dramatic impact on a whole host of higher order cognitive functions—including things like concentration, strategic thinking, troubleshooting, and decision-making. Study after study has found that your performance will dramatically improve if you are working in optimal conditions (with high rates of ventilation, few damaging persistent chemicals, and optimal humidity, lighting and noise control). So what would it take to turn that knowledge into action?
Cutting through the jargon to explain complex processes in simple and compelling language, Allen and Macomber show how buildings can both expose you to and protect you from disease. They reveal the 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building, share insider tips, and show how tracking what they call “health performance indicators” with smart technology can boost a company’s performance and create economic value. With decades of practice in protecting worker health, they offer a clear way forward right now, and show us what comes next in a post-COVID world. While the “green” building movement introduced important new efficiencies, it’s time to look beyond the four walls—placing the decisions we make around buildings into the larger conversation around development and health, and prioritizing the most important and vulnerable asset of any building: its people.
In recent years, globalization and the expansion of information technologies have reshaped managerial practices, forcing multinational firms to adjust business practices to different environments and domestic companies to adjust to their foreign competitors. In International Differences in the Business Practices and Productivity of Firms, a distinguished group of contributors examines the phenomenon of widespread differences in managerial practices across firms, establishments within firms, and countries.
This volume brings together eight studies that combine qualitative and quantitative insider analysis of business practices such as the use of teams, incentive pay, lean manufacturing, and quality control, revealing the elements that determine which practices are adopted and why. International Differences in the Business Practices and Productivity of Firms offers a much-needed model for measuring the productivity and performance of international firms in a fast-paced global economy.
Charles R. Hulten is professor of economics at the University of Maryland. He has been a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and is chair of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Michael Harper is chief of the Division of Productivity Research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Edwin R. Dean, formerly associate commissioner for Productivity and Technology at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is adjunct professor of economics at The George Washington University.
The Power of Productivity provides powerful and controversial answers to these questions. William W. Lewis, the director emeritus of the McKinsey Global Institute, here draws on extensive microeconomic studies of thirteen nations over twelve years—conducted by the Institute itself—to counter virtually all prevailing wisdom about how best to ameliorate economic disparity. Lewis's research, which included studying everything from state-of-the-art auto makers to black-market street vendors and mom-and-pop stores, conclusively demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, providing more capital to poor nations is not the best way to help them. Nor is improving levels of education, exchange-rate flexibility, or government solvency enough. Rather, the key to improving economic conditions in poor countries, argues Lewis, is increasing productivity through intense, fair competition and protecting consumer rights.
As The Power of Productivity explains, this sweeping solution affects the economies of poor nations at all levels—from the viability of major industries to how the average consumer thinks about his or her purchases. Policies must be enacted in developing nations that reflect a consumer rather than a producer mindset and an attendant sense of consumer rights. Only one force, Lewis claims, can stand up to producer special privileges—consumer interests.
The Institute's unprecedented research method and Lewis's years of experience with economic policy combine to make The Power of Productivity the most authoritative and compelling view of the global economy today, one that will inform political and economic debate throughout the world for years to come.
The Census Bureau has recently begun releasing official statistics that measure the movements of firms in and out of business and workers in and out of jobs. The economic analyses in Producer Dynamics exploit this newly available data on establishments, firms, and workers, to address issues in industrial organization, labor, growth, macroeconomics, and international trade.
This innovative volume brings together a group of renowned economists to probe topics such as firm dynamics across countries; patterns of employment dynamics; firm dynamics in nonmanufacturing industries such as retail, health services, and agriculture; employer-employee turnover from matched worker/firm data sets; and turnover in international markets. Producer Dynamics will serve as an invaluable reference to economists and policy makers seeking to understand the links between firms and workers, and the sources of economic dynamics, in the age of globalization.
The question of the comparative efficiency of socialism, long debated in theoretical discussions, is explored in depth in these studies. Abram Bergson, one of the foremost Western scholars of the Soviet system, focuses especially on socialism as found in the USSR, and thus on the famous “Soviet model.” This includes centralist planning with its reliance on bureaucratic, as distinct from market processes, and a development strategy stressing growth and, until recently, limited economic relations with the capitalist West. Devoting some attention also to the experience with the “Soviet model” in Eastern Europe, Bergson compares the resulting economic performance with that in the West. The United States is the major Western country considered, but Western European nations are also studied with care and precision.
The “Soviet model” has been evolving in the course of time, and these studies explore recent developments in planning, particularly managerial incentives and controls, and growth strategy. In contrasting Eastern and Western economic performance, Bergson uses sophisticated quantitative techniques to contrast levels and growth of productivity while allowing for differences in historical factors, especially the stage of economic development. Productivity is considered both for the economy generally and for its sectors. Although socialist efficiency is investigated mainly through the Soviet case, this path-breaking book should serve as a point of departure for further inquiries into that large theme.
The contributors focus their efforts on the accurate measurement and comparison of Japanese and U.S. economic growth. Assuming that any sustained increase in real GNP must be due either to an increase in the quantity of capital and labor used in production or to the more efficient use of these inputs, the authors analyze the individual contributions of various factors and their importance in the process of output growth.
These essays extend the methodology of growth analysis and offer many insights into the factors leading to the superior performance of the Japanese economy. They demonstrate that growth is a complex process and no single factor can explain the Japanese 'miracle.'
Zvi Griliches was a modern master of empirical economics. In this short book, he recounts what he and others have learned about the sources of economic growth. This book conveys the way he tackled research problems. For Griliches, economic theorizing without measurement is merely the fashioning of parables, but measurement without theory is blind. Judgment enables one to strike the right balance.
The book begins with economists' first attempts to measure productivity growth systematically in the 1930s. In the mid-1950s these efforts culminated in a startling puzzle. The growth of measured inputs like labor and capital explained only a fraction of the growth of national output. Economists called this phenomenon "efficiency" or "technical change" or "the residual." However, Griliches observes that the most accurate name was a "measure of our ignorance." What explained the rest of economic growth quickly became one of the most important questions in economics.
Over the next thirty years, Griliches and his colleagues and students looked for various components of the residual in education (the formation of human capital), investment (the formation of physical capital), and research and development. In 1973, after the oil price shocks, productivity growth slowed and the residual almost disappeared. Since the shocks were a short-term phenomenon, they could not account for the slowdown. A main focus of this book is therefore the puzzle of the productivity slowdown and how to date it and how to explain it.
Griliches began his studies of productivity growth during the 1950s, adding a variable of "knowledge stock" to traditional production function models, and his work has served as the point of departure for much of the research into R&D and productivity. This collection of essays documents both Griliches's distinguished career as well as the history of this line of thought.
As inputs into production increasingly taking the form of "intellectual capital" and new technologies that are not as easily measured as traditional labor and capital, the methods Griliches has refined and applied to R&D become crucial to understanding today's economy.
The neoclassical theory of distribution, developed in the last decades of the nineteenth century, relies on the postulate that in equilibrium there exist constant returns to scale, not only in particular firms and industries, but in the economy as a whole. As general equilibrium theory developed, emphasis was sifted to the properties of equilibrium, to the proofs of its existence, and to the attributes of welfare. The possibility of increasing returns represented an analytical “monkey wrench” thrown in the whole neoclassical structure. Thus, the neglect of increasing returns may have been methodologically understandable – if scientifically scandalous. Only in recent years has the increasing returns postulate returned to the mainstream through analyses of endogenous growth, international trade, unemployment, and the economics of ethics.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press