Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

This paper examines how productivity effects of human capital and innovation vary at different points of the conditional productivity distribution. Our analysis draws upon two large unbalanced panels of 6,634 enterprises in Germany and 14,586 enterprises in the Netherlands over the period...

The process of firms' growth - in terms of productivity or employment - is a major concern of policy makers. In this context, innovations are considered to play a crucial role in stimulating firms' performance. This book investigates this general hypothesis by looking at three topics: 1. Does...