In 2005 the French government launched a policy of competitiveness clusters, giving subsidies for innovative projects managed locally and collectively by firms, research centers and universities. This paper proposes an ex-ante analysis of the outcome of the selection process that took place...

During the past ten years, the emerging economies, exporters of manufactured products or services, and the rentier states, exporters of primary products, have eroded the dominant position of the developed countries in world markets. The EU15 has lost less ground than the US or Japan. The EU15...

We consider the impact of low-wage countries’ competition on the quality content of high-wage countries’ exports. We develop a new method that uses firm-level data to measure quality changes in sectoral exports. Over 1995-2005, we measure a 11% increase in the mean quality of France’s...

GeoDist makes available the exhaustive set of gravity variables used in Mayer and Zignago (2005). GeoDist provides several geographical variables, in particular bilateral distances measured using citylevel data to assess the geographic distribution of population inside each nation. We have...

Firm-level regressions show that Champagne producers that receive better ratings from wine guides also export to more markets, charge higher prices, and sell more in each market. Our method corrects for a severe selection bias predicted by the model. By using direct measures of quality, we can...