It is now stylized that, while the impact of ownership on firm productivity is unclear, product market competition can be expected to have a positive impact on productivity, thereby making entry (or contestability of markets) desirable. Traditional research in the context of entry has explored...

This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization on firms' product and labor market power. We estimate the prevalence and intensity of firm-level price-cost markups and either wage markups or wage markdowns. We take the dependence between these model-consistent measures of product and...

Available wisdom suggests that a negative relationship prevails between economic freedom and perceived corruption among firms. However, the relationship is far from linear and a number of complex interactions make it fairly nuanced. We show that greater competition may accentuate the problem of...

This paper presents a dynamic model that analyzes how firms' expectations with regards to technological change influence the demand for outsourcing. We show that outsourcing becomes more beneficial to the firm when technology is changing rapidly. As the pace of innovations in production...

Conventional wisdom depicts corruption as a tax on incumbent firms. This paper challenges this view in two ways. First, by arguing that corruption matters not so much because of the value of the bribe ("tax"), but because of another less studied feature of corruption, namely bribe...

This paper uses a unique new data set on nearly a thousand manufacturing firms in Brazil and India to investigate the determinants of ICT adoption and its impact on performance in both countries. The descriptive evidence shows that Brazilian firms on average use ICT more intensively than their...

To date there has been few systematic and comparative empirical analyses of the nature of economic development in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring the patterns of structural change between 1980 and 2010, focusing on the...

We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year-olds in eight countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. The UK, Sweden, Canada and the US obtain the...

We investigate the micro-level determinants of labor force participation of urban married women in eight low- and middle-income economies: Bolivia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, South Africa, Tanzania, and Vietnam. In order to understand what drives changes and differences in participation...