This paper examines the interaction between productivity growth, firms’ monopolistic market power, and workers’ wage bargaining power. Our study contributes to several strands of literatures. First, we examine a monopolistic framework which accounts for wage bargaining. In addition to the...

The transition from traditional labor intensive to modern capital intensive production is a key factor for industrial development. Using half a million observations from Indian manufacturing plants, I analyze the effects of a secular decrease in industrial electricity prices through the lens of...

We identify a puzzling management practice gap in China. In the South, a one standard deviation increase in firms' management competency is associated with a 7.5 percent improvement in sales productivity and a 29.2 increase in profitability. But such associations are muted for firms located in...

A body of literature suggests that ethnic heterogeneity limits economic growth. This paper provides microeconometric evidence on the direct effect of ethnic divisions on productivity. In team production at a plant in Kenya, an upstream worker supplies and distributes flowers to two downstream...

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...

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...

The productivity of firms is, at least partly, determined by a firm's actions and decisions. One of these decisions involves the organization of production in terms of the number of layers of management the firm decides to employ. Using detailed employer-employee matched data and firm production...

We conduct an empirical investigation into the effects of foreign ownership on worker skills using firm-level data from Spain. To control for endogeneity bias due to selection into foreign ownership, we combine a difference-in-differences approach with a propensity score weighting estimator. Our...

In geographically segmented credit markets, local real estate booms can deteriorate the funding conditions for small manufacturing firms and undermine their competitiveness. Using exogenous variation in the administrative land supply across 172 Chinese cities, we show that higher predicted real...

How do geographic frictions affect firm organization? We show theoretically and empirically that geographic frictions increase the use of middle managers in multi-establishment firms. In our model, we assume that the time of the CEO of a firm is a resource of limited supply that is shared among...