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...

We use a unique cross-section survey of manufacturing firms from four European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain) linked with balance sheet data to study the relationship between key aspects of globalization and firm-level markups. The main results are: (i) Exporting is positively...

This study employs the hedonic property price method to analyze the flood risk effect on a rich set of data. The analysis is carried out on Hungary, but as the control variables are extremely elaborated, our results have general importance. The paper finds a significant reduction in housing...

A great deal of multinationals receive a bundle of hidden or cash subsidizes upon investing in a foreign country. Policymakers often argue that a subsidy today will help locate friends of the investor later on. Using extensive data on FDI investments, we analyze such patterns. In particular, we...

Enhancing competitiveness is a popular target in economic policy making - not only at the national, but at the regional level as well despite neither generally accepted definition nor any strong agreement on how to measure it. In this chapter we discuss the conceptual underpinnings of why it is...

This paper proposes a simple method measuring spatial robustness of estimated coefficients and considers the role of administrative districts and regions' size. The procedure, dubbed "Grid and Shake", offers a solution for a practical empirical issue, when one compares a variables of interest...

This paper reviews a set of issues related to the concept and measurement of regional competitiveness. First, the concept of growth and competitiveness is argued to be different at regional level from the national level. In particular, the relationship between agglomeration and performance, the...

This paper show evidence that firms choose from a much larger set of internationalization modes than usually assumed in the international trade literature and that this choice is governed by similar selection processes than the one proposed by Helpman, Melitz, Yeaple (2004 AER). We rely on a...

Most trade theories assume bilateral trade relationships are forged on the basis of some comparative advantages, scale considerations, market structure or some productivity advantage of firms. Since these factors change slowly, bilateral trade relationships should be stable. However, we argue...

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...