South Africa has undergone a remarkable transformation since its democratic transition in 1994, but economic growth and employment generation have been disappointing. Most worryingly, unemployment is currently among the highest in the world. While the proximate cause of high unemployment is that...

We develop a theory of multiproduct firms to analyze the effects of globalization on the distributions of firm size, scope, and productivity. Our model explains two puzzles. First, it explains the well-known size-discount puzzle: large firms have lower values of Tobin%u2019s Q than small firms....

“Moore's Law” in the semiconductor manufacturing industry is used to describe the predictable historical evolution of a single manufacturing technology platform that has been continuously reducing the costs of fabricating electronic circuits since the mid-1960s. Some features of its future...

This paper examines the relation between ownership, corporate form, and innovation for a cross-section of private and publicly traded innovating firms in the US and 15 European countries. A striking novel observation emerges from our analysis: while most innovating firms in the US are publicly...

We use plant output and input prices to decompose the profit margin into four parts: productivity, demand shocks, mark-ups and input costs. We find that each of these market fundamentals are important in explaining plant exit. We then use variation across sectors in tariff changes after the...

The inefficiencies related to endogenous product creation and variety under monopolistic competition are two-fold: one static—the misalignment between consumers and producers regarding the value of a new variety; and one dynamic—time variation in markups. Quantitatively, the welfare costs of...

Recent studies of late nineteenth century labor market integration have found that despite high rates of geographic mobility relatively large inter- and intra-regional differentials in real wages persisted with little tendency toward convergence. These results point to the absence of a unified...

This paper analyzes the timing, pace and efficiency of the on- going job reallocation that results from product and process innovation. There are strong reasons why an efficient economy ought to concentrate both job creation and destruction during cyclical downturns, when the opportunity cost of...