This paper studies cross-sectional heterogeneity in price-cost margins and the extent of rent sharing among 48 sectors and 10738 (mainly manufacturing) firms in France. At the sectoral level, the average price-cost mark-up and the average extent of rent sharing amount to 1.701 and 0.368...

At the firm level, revenue and costs are well measured but prices and quantities are not. This paper shows that because of these data limitations estimates of returns to scale at the firm level are for the revenue function, not production function. Given this observation, the paper argues that,...

Using 2005 firm level data for 26 ECA countries, this paper estimates performance gaps between male- and female-owned businesses, while controlling for their location by industry and country. We find that female entrepreneurs have significantly smaller scale of operations (as measured by sales...

During the second part of the 1990s, the Israeli economy experienced a surge in labor productivity and total factor productivity, which was driven primarily by the manufacturing sector. This surge in productivity coincided with the full absorption and integration into the workforce of highly...

We use panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants to study the connection between plants’ responses to changes in the economic environment and their contributions to aggregate productivity growth in the period following the implementation of the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In all...

This paper evaluates the impact of the widespread use of fixed-term contracts in Spain on firms' TFP, via its effect on workers' effort. We propose a simple analytical framework showing that, under plausible conditions, workers' effort depends positively on their perception (for given level of...

This paper uses a newly available comprehensive panel data set for manufacturing enterprises from 2001 to 2005 to document the first empirical results on the relationship between imports and productivity for Germany, a leading actor on the world market for goods. Furthermore, for the first time...

It is now stylized that, while the impact of ownership on firm productivity is unclear, product market competition can be expected to have a positive impact on productivity, thereby making entry (or contestability of markets) desirable. Traditional research in the context of entry has explored...

This paper presents a tractable formalization and an empirical investigation of the quality-complementarity hypothesis, the hypothesis that input quality and plant productivity are complementary in generating output quality. We embed this complementarity in a general-equilibrium trade model with...