This paper presents cross-section estimates of gross hourly wage premia on tertiary education. They are based on a unified framework for 21 OECD countries from the 1990s to the early 2000s and use international household surveys to maximise international comparability. The results of the...

Legal systems provide the basic institutions for firms and markets to operate. Their quality can have important consequences on the size distribution of firms, who rely on them for contract enforcement. This paper uses the variation in legal system quality across states in Mexico to examine the...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the role that policy and institutional settings in both product and labour market play for productivity and firm dynamics. It exploits a new firm-level database for ten OECD countries and industry-level data for a broader set of countries, together with...

This paper surveys recent empirical studies exploring aggregate productivity growth based on firm dynamics, focusing on micro-data from OECD countries. Aggregate productivity growth can be analysed as a sum of two separate processes. <I>i</I>) Changes in productivity in individual firms at a given size...</i>

This paper examines problems of entry, exit and competition in Ukrainian product markets. It finds that Ukraine still has too little of all three, and that exit mechanisms, in particular, function poorly. Since impediments to entry and exit are largely the product of excessive and ill...

This paper assesses the progress of China’s transition toward a market economy by examining the structure of ownership, productivity, and profitability, as well as the concentration of production across firms, industries and regions. It does this by analyzing a database of firm microdata of...

India’s growth performance has improved significantly over the past 20 years, but has been uneven across industries and states. While some service industries, notably in the information and communications technology sector, have become highly competitive in world markets – yielding...

This paper provides a synthesis of what is known about the determinants of output growth based on studying microeconomic data sets. It starts with a summary of the theoretical explanations which help reconcile heterogeneous performance observed across establishments in the same sector. The...

Education has been given high priority by India’s central and state governments and continues to grow fast. School access has been expanded by investment in school infrastructure and recruitment of teachers. In higher education too, the number of providers continues to rise rapidly. A new law...