In this paper I analyze the productivity gains from trade liberalization in the Belgian textile industry. So far, empirical research has established a strong relationship between opening up to trade and productivity, relying almost entirely on deflated sales to proxy for output in the production...

Production functions are a central component in a variety of economic analyses. However, these production functions often first need to be estimated using data on individual production units. There is reason to believe that, more than any other input in the production process, there are severe...

We evaluate the impact of international competition on firm-level perfor- mance in Belgium. In the manufacturing sector we consider both the impact of global competition through measures of import penetration and the impact of within-EU competitiveness using measures of relative labor cost. In...

This paper estimates the extent to which market power is a source of production misallocation. Productive inefficiency occurs through more production being allocated to higher cost units of production, and less production to lower-cost production units, conditional on a fixed aggregate quantity....