In this article we analyse the effects of different regulatory schemes (price cap and profit sharing) on a firm s investment of endogenous size. Using a real option approach in continuous time, we show that profit sharing does not affect a firm s start-up decision relative to a pure price cap...

The introduction of firm size into labor search models raises the question how wages are set when average and marginal product differ. We develop and analyze an alternative to the existing bargaining framework: Firms compete for labor by publicly posting long-term contracts. In such a...

Financial constraints are an important impediment to the growth of small businesses. We study theoretically and empirically how the financial constraints of agents affect their decisions to exert effort, and, hence the organizational decisions and growth of principals, in the context of...

This paper provides a direct test of how fixed export costs and productivity jointly determine firm-level export behavior. Using Chilean data, we construct indices of fixed export costs for each industry-region-year triplet and match them to domestic firms. Our empirical results show that firms...

When employers face a trade-off between growing large and paying low wages - that is, when they have monopsony power - some productive employers will decide to acquire fewer customers, forgo sales, and remain small. These decisions have adverse consequences for aggregate labor productivity....

This paper investigates (i) whether growth and profitability persist in banking firms, (ii) whether the level and volatility of growth and profitability are bank-size dependent, and (iii) the relationship between growth and profitability of a bank. Using a dynamic panel model estimated by GMM...

Using administrative employee-firm-level data on the entire private sector from 1994 to 2007, we show that the labor market in France has polarized: employment shares of high and low wage occupations have grown, while middle wage occupations have shrunk. During the same period, the share of...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

Increasing wage inequality between similar workers plays an important role for overall inequality trends in industrialized societies. To analyze this pattern, we incorporate directed labor market search into a dynamic model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and homogeneous workers....