This paper assesses the impact of product market competition on job instability as proxied by the use of fixed-term labor contracts. Using both worker data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey and firm data from the Spanish Business Strategies Survey, I show that job instability rises with...

This paper provides an overview of the complex conceptual and practical challenges that emerging market economies face as they attempt to reform their frameworks for financial regulation. These economies are striving to balance the quest for financial stability with the imperatives of financial...

Twenty years have passed since Freeman and Medoff's What Do Unions Do? This essay assesses their analysis of how unions in the U.S. private sector affect economic performance - productivity, profitability, investment, and growth. Freeman and Medoff are clearly correct that union productivity...

The Slovenian transition represents a slow but steady liberalization of constraints on competition. Using a unique longitudinal data set on all manufacturing firms in Slovenia over the period 1994-2001, this study analyzes how firm efficiency changed in response to changing competitive...

Do firms employing undocumented workers have a competitive advantage? Using administrative data from the state of Georgia, this paper investigates the incidence of undocumented worker employment across firms and how it affects firm survival. Firms are found to engage in herding behavior, being...

This paper presents a tractable formalization and an empirical investigation of the quality-complementarity hypothesis, the hypothesis that input quality and plant productivity are complementary in generating output quality. We embed this complementarity in a general-equilibrium trade model with...

This paper studies the effect of product market competition on the compensation packages that firms offer to their executives and in particular its impact on the sensitivity of pay to performance. To measure the effect of competition we use two different identification strategies on a panel of...