We study the implications of robot adoption at the level of individual firms using a rich panel data-set of Spanish manufacturing firms over a 27-year period (1990-2016). We focus on three central questions: (1) Which firms adopt robots? (2) What are the labor market effects of robot adoption at...

This paper argues that tax avoidance by large corporations has contributed to the 25% increase in concentration among U.S. firms since the mid-1990s. Corporate tax avoidance gives large firms a competitive edge, which translates into larger market shares and an increase in the granularity of the...

Can culture explain persistent differences in economic activity among individuals and across regions? A novel measure of cultural origin enables us to contrast the entrepreneurial activity of individuals located in the same municipality but whose ancestors lived just on opposite sides of the...

This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new survey panel on German manufacturing firms, we show that uncertainty reflects change: Planning incorporates higher subjective uncertainty about future sales growth when the firm has just experienced unusual growth, and more so if...

We use French data over the 1994-2013 period to study how imports of industrial robots affect firm-level outcomes. Compared to other firms operating in the same 5-digit sector, robot importers are larger, more productive, and employ a higher share of managers and engineers. Over time, robot...

In this paper, we traced the survival status of 94,401 small businesses in 17 European emerging markets from 2007–2017 and empirically examined the determinants of their survival, focusing on institutional quality and financial development. We found that institutional quality and the level of...

Global value chains have fundamentally transformed international trade and development in recent decades. We use matched firm-level customs and manufacturing survey data, together with Input-Output tables for China, to examine how Chinese firms position themselves in global production lines and...

Development projects in the oil industry often have cost overruns. Through analysis of data from Norwegian development projects in the petroleum industry, this paper investigates the common effect of business cycle developments on cost overruns. Lack of capacity and expertise in a tight supplier...

We investigate the potential for statistical forecasting of aggregate oil and gas investment on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). A unique and detailed dataset containing data from 109 different fields on the NCS between 1970 and 2015 was employed. A set of 1080 autoregressive distributed...

The oil and gas sector plays a crucial role in the Norwegian economy. It accounts for a very large proportion of gross domestic product, government revenues, investment and exports. A sharp fall in oil prices has had a significant impact on the economy and focused great attention on the cost...