Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...

Numerous econometric studies fail to detect a signicant and robust relationship between international aid and economic growth in the recipient countries. Dutch Disease effects might be responsible for this result.This paper examines the relation between aid and its effectiveness in a...

The decision of companies to enter international markets, either via exports or foreign direct investment (FDI), has been postulated by the self-sorting model of Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple (HMY, 2004). In the strict sense, the theoretical predictions of HMY only apply to firms that become...

This paper studies the internationalization behaviour of French companies, using more than 330.000 observations for three two-year intervals. We analyze the role of productivity, organisational and ownership structure, and of financial characteristics for the decision to enter into and exit from...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the effects of cross-border M&As on investing firms' domestic performance in the U.K. and France. We build a new firm-level dataset that combines a global M&A database with balance sheet data for the years 2000-2007. Combining matching techniques with a...

We scrutinize the role of capital flows in competitiveness in a set of seven euroarea member countries (Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovenia, and the Slovak Republic) in the context of real convergence and crisis. A specific focus is on Greece. The paper extends the seminal...

This paper extends the literature on the determinants of international activity at the firm level towards cross-border acquisitions and greenfield investments as different modes of FDI using a rich dataset of British firms. While multinational firms are characterized by higher productivity...

Since at least the mid-2000's, many advanced economies have experienced low productivity growth. This development is often related to the declining productivity gains at the technology frontier, which is commonly assumed to be determined by the U.S. We challenge this explanation by studying the...

To what extent have economies become better off because of the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT)? We analyze this question based on a growth accounting approach at the level of final output. This approach traces productivity improvements not within sectors but within...