Observationally equivalent workers are paid higher wages in larger firms. This fact is often named as the "firm-size wage gap" and is regarded as a key empirical puzzle. Using micro-level data from Turkey, we document a new stylized fact: the firm-size wage gap is more pronounced for informal...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, there is hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ those workers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory of skill-biased change...

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...

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies this to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with exactly 50 or more employees....

How and why does the firm size distribution differ across countries? Using two datasets covering more than 30 countries, this paper documents that several features of the firm size distribution are strongly associated with income per capita: the entrepreneurship rate and the fraction of small...

Available wisdom suggests that a negative relationship prevails between economic freedom and perceived corruption among firms. However, the relationship is far from linear and a number of complex interactions make it fairly nuanced. We show that greater competition may accentuate the problem of...

This paper suggests that contingent on the productivity level of the trade partner; international trade may create resource misallocation in less productive countries. It theoretically shows how productivity spillovers induced by trade with more productive countries and heterogeneity in...

Using both regression analysis and an unsupervised graphical model approach (never applied before to this issue), we confirm the rejection of the Gibrat's law when our firm-level data are considered over the entire investigated period, while the opposite is true when we allow for market...

In 2002 we published a paper in which we used state space time series methods to analyse the teenage employment‐federal minimum wage relationship in the US (Bazen and Marimoutou, 2002). The study used quarterly data for the 46 year period running from 1954 to 1999. We detected a small,...

This paper describes a moments estimator for a standard state-space model with coefficients generated by a random walk. A penalized least squares estimation is linked to the GLS (Aitken) estimates of the corresponding linear model with time-invariant parameters. The VC estimates are moments...