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...

Nishimura et al. (2005) analyze the entry/exit behavior of Japanese firms during the 1990s and find that relatively efficient firms exited while relatively inefficient firms survived during the banking-crisis period of 1996-97. They conclude that the natural selection mechanism (NSM) apparently...

Economies respond differently to aggregate shocks that reduce output. While some countries rapidly recover their pre-crisis trend, others stagnate. Recent studies provide empirical support for a link between aggregate growth and plant dynamics through its effect on productivity: the entry and...

A firm's productivity depends on how production is organized given the level of demand for its product. To capture this mechanism, we develop a theory of an economy where firms with heterogeneous demands use labor and knowledge to produce. Entrepreneurs decide the number of layers of management...

This paper discusses recent theoretical and empirical work on the interactions between growth and business cycles. One may distinguish two very different types of approaches to the problem of the influence of macroeconomic fluctuations on long-run growth. In the first type of approach, which...

The study examines US-European productivity and worker attitude differences, focusing on changes in incentive structures. We analyze productivity and worker attitudes in five plants in the UK and US belonging to the same multinational producer of automotive sensors and actuators. We examine the...

In this paper we develop a multi-sector general equilibrium model of firm heterogeneity, worker heterogeneity and labor market frictions. We characterize the distributions of employment, unemployment, wages and income within and between sectors as a function of structural parameters. We find...

This paper develops a simple framework to estimate the parameters of the production function together with the elasticity of the demand for the output and the impact of demand and cost shifters. The use of this framework helps, in the first place, to treat successfully the difficult problem of...

This paper employs survival analysis to study the duration of US imports. We find that the median duration of exporting a product to the US is very short, on the order to two to four years. Our results also indicate that there is negative duration dependence meaning that if a country is able to...

The implications of national security related procedures for trade flows at border points in OECD countries has become a major topic of commentary in popular press. We discuss whether the economic costs of border delays are represented solely by time spent in awaiting processing. This has been...