We analyze the impact of privatization on multifactor productivity (MFP) using long panel data for nearly the universe of initially stateowned manufacturing firms in four economies. Controlling for firm and industry-year fixed effects and employing a wide variety of measurement approaches, we...

Firms cluster their economic activities to exploit technological and informational spillovers from other firms. Spillovers through the entry of multinational firms can be particularly beneficial to domestic firms because of their technological superiority. Yet, the importance of foreign firm's...

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of the early Romanian privatization setup, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from any privatization, we test how politicians select firms into privatization programs. Using a comprehensive dataset that includes all firms inherited from...

We exploit a panel dataset of Hungarian firms merged with product-level trade data for the period 1992-2003 to investigate the relation between firms' trading activities (importing, exporting or both) and productivity. We find important self-selection effects of the most productive firms induced...

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of the early Romanian privatization setup, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from any privatization, we test how politicians select firms into privatization. Using comprehensive data that includes all firms inherited from socialism, we estimate...

This paper estimates the relationship between innovation and firm performance by using Community Innovation Survey data for Hungary. It exploits the possibility of linking the innovation data to ownership and disaggregated trade data. Innovative firms are more productive, more likely to trade...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between productivity growth and firm dynamics using firm-level data between 1992 and 2006. Theories emphasising firm-level heterogeneity show that industry-level productivity may not only increase as a consequence of increasing within-firm...

An identical two-sector productivity shock causes Rybczynski (1955) and Stolper and Samuelson (1941) effects that release leisure time and initially raise the relative price of human capital investment so as to favor it over goods production. Modified by having the household sector produce human...

This paper presents the specificities of Hungarian foreign trading firms from different perspectives, like concentration, efficiency and sectoral structure. Hungarian trade is highly concentrated similarly to other countries. Trading firms are more efficient than their non-trading peers,...

In his 1966 Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge, entitled On the Causes of the Slow Rate of Economic Growth in the UK, the Hungarian-born British economist, Nicholas Kaldor presented a series of "laws" to account for the growth rate differences between Britain on the one hand, and the more successful...