Many basic economic theories with perfectly functioning markets do not predict the existence of the vast number of microenterprises readily observed across the world. We put forward a model that illuminates why financial and managerial capital constraints may impede experimentation, and thus...

During transition, maintaining employment and providing a social safety net for the unemployed are important to social stability, which in turn is crucial for the productivity of the whole economy. Because independent institutions for social safety are lacking and firms with strong profit...

We test whether managerial human capital has a first order effect on the performance and growth of small enterprises in emerging markets. In a randomized control trial in Puebla, Mexico, we randomly assigned 150 out of 432 small and medium size enterprises to receive subsidized consulting...

This Paper works with a broad data sample of Czech voucher-privatized firms during 1996-99. It analyses the development of ownership structure and consequently its effect on a firm's performance Ownership concentration had been quite high in 1996 and steadily increased. The single largest owner...

The paper explains how a country can fall into a 'low-skill, bad-job trap', in which workers acquire insufficient training and firms provide insufficient skilled vacancies. In particular, the paper argues that in countries where a large proportion of the workforce is unskilled, firms have little...

We estimate impulse responses of sectoral price indexes to aggregate shocks and to sector-specific shocks. In the median sector, 100 percent of the long-run response of the sectoral price index to a sector-specific shock occurs in the month of the shock. The standard Calvo model and the standard...

We investigate the role of information spillovers (IS) in determining firms' labour adjustments. We test the proposition that information on relevant state variables spills over through one firm's decision to affect those of other firms. Our test is based on the assumption that spillovers matter...

This paper models payment evasion as a source of profit by letting the firm choose the purchase price and the fine imposed on detected payment evaders. For a given price and fine, the consumers purchase, evade payment, or choose the outside option. We show that payment evasion leads to a form of...

Using a general two-stage framework, this paper gives sufficient conditions for increasing competition to have negative or positive effects on R&D-investment, respectively. Both possibilities arise in plausible situations, even if one uses relatively narrow definitions of increasing competition....

What is the role of firms and markets in mediating the division of labour? This Paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine law firms' boundaries. We first examine how the specialization of lawyers and firms increases as lawyers' returns to specialization increase....