Productivity growth is slowing down among OECD countries, coupled with increased misallocation of resources. A recent strand of literature focuses on the role of non-viable firms (“zombie firms”) to explain these developments. Using a rich firm-level dataset for one of the OECD countries...

This empirical paper documents the relationship between the composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany using newly...

Participation in global value chains (GVCs) can be a pathway for economic development. It is associated with growing productivity, exporting more sophisticated products and a less concentrated export basket (Kowalski et al., 2015). However, it is often argued that these benefits accrue mainly to...

Learning by exporting refers to the mechanism whereby a firm's performance improves after entering export markets. This mechanism is often mentioned in policy documents, but many econometric studies have not found corroborating evidence. I show that the econometric methods rely on an assumption...

This paper investigates a unique policy designed to maintain employment during the privatization of East German firms after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The policy required new owners of the firms to commit to employment targets, with penalties for non-compliance. Using a dynamic model, we...

Policies that spur more efficient corporate restructuring can revive productivity growth by targeting three inter-related sources of labour productivity weakness: the survival of “zombie” firms (low productivity firms that would typically exit in a competitive market), capital misallocation...