The paper argues that networked firms are likely to have an advantage in securing externalfinance in countries with weak legal and judicial institutions since it helps financial institutionsto minimize the underlying agency costs of lending. An analysis of recent BEEPS data fromfifteen Central...

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents thatexporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. Thispositive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies aftercontrolling for observed...

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities onfirms’ performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontiertechnique is applied, basing the analysis on a unique unbalanced longitudinal datasetconsisting of 532 top...

We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by thecurrent and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. Theequivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking pricesparametrically. This result justifies TFP...

Very little is known about the effectiveness of SME policies, and a careful look at thestructure, mechanisms and incentives provided by these policies suggest caution in theirimplementation and, most importantly, the need to carefully and closely monitor their results.This paper relies on the...