When workers are in bad health, their productivity declines. We investigate whether the health of employees affects firm performance, taking advantage of the severity of the seasonal influenza seasons as a source of exogenous variation. We find that firms whose employees are particularly...

This paper attempts to study the relationship between firm legal form and firm performance in the Middle East and North Africa Region (MENA) using the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) database. Our analysis shows that open shareholding, closed shareholding, partnership, and limited...

Using a unique dataset on worldwide multinational corporations with precise location of headquarters and affiliates, I present evidence of a trade-off between distance to the headquarters and the knowledge intensity of the foreign subsidiary's economic activity, emerging from dynamics related to...

Policy makers find it difficult to promote economic development through entrepreneurship and SMEs. In this paper we argue that this is because the positive impact of entrepreneurship is overestimated and its negative impact underestimated. It is moreover also because there is no unified...

In this paper, we focus on managerial characteristics of micro and small-sized firms. Using linked employer-employee data on the Portuguese economy for the 2010-2018 period, we estimate the impact of management teams' human capital on the probability of firms becoming financially distressed and...

The present paper argues that the effect of corruption on foreign ownership is not necessarily linear and depends on the level of host corruption. So long as the expected returns from foreign investments exceed its expected costs, higher host corruption will be associated with higher foreign...

In this contribution, we examine the interrelation between corporate age structures and firm performance. In particular, we address the issues, whether firms with young rather than older employees are successful and whether firms with homogeneous or heterogeneous workforces are doing well....

We develop an equilibrium model of wages and estimate it using administrative data from Norway. Coworkers interact through a task-assignment model, and wages are determined through multilateral bargaining over the surplus that accrues to the workforce. Seniority affects wages through workplace...

We use a new database, the National Establishment Time Series (NETS), to revisit the debate about the role of small businesses in job creation. Birch (e.g., 1987) argued that small firms are the most important source of job creation in the U.S. economy. But Davis et al. (1996a) argued that this...

This paper investigates the effects of the workforce age structure on the productivity of large Belgian firms. More precisely, it examines different scenarios of changes in the proportion of young (16-29 years), middle-aged (30-49 years) and old (more than 49 years) workers and their expected...