This paper documents a strong positive relationship between individual reported trust levels (obtained from the US General Social Survey) and the competitiveness of the sector in which an individual works (obtained from the US census of firms). This correlation is robust to the inclusion of all...

We survey the research on the effect of employment laws in developing countries, using papers published since 2004. The survey is further supported by cross-country correlation analyses. Both exercises show that developing countries with rigid employment laws tend to have larger informal sectors...

This paper studies alternative methods of privatizing a formerly communist firm in the presence of imperfect risk markets. The methods include cash sales, a give-away scheme, and a participation contract where the government retains a sleeping fractional ownership in the firm. It is shown that...

Understanding the development of chainstores is important given the large GDP share of services and the continuing importance of chains in bringing these services to market. Service chains provide a puzzle because they take a long time to develop even when there are obvious expansion...

I survey the influence of Grossman and Hart's (1986) seminal paper in the field of International Trade. I discuss the implementation of the theory in open-economy environments and its implications for the international organization of production and the structure of international trade flows. I...

We investigate the roles of productivity and the specificity of inputs for the international sourcing strategy of firms which are part of a multinational network. We present a framework in which firms decide to import from a foreign independent supplier or from their related party abroad...

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported...

Recent human capital theories predict that labor market frictions and product market competition influence firm-sponsored training. Using matched worker-firm data from Dutch manufacturing, our paper empirically assesses the validity of these predictions. We find that a decrease in labor market...

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....

Do variations in labor market institutions across countries affect the cross-border organization of the firm? Using firm-level data on multinationals located in France, we show that firms are more likely to outsource the production of intermediate inputs to external suppliers when importing from...