It has recently been shown that the firm size distribution is initially skewed to the right and then evolves over time to become more log-normal, and argued that this is likely due to firms initially facing financial constraints, see Cabral and Mata (2003). We conjecture that, it this is true,...

We use a unique exogenous corporate tax policy change in the Republic of Ireland to investigate how corporate taxation affects foreign direct investment at the extensive and intensive margin. To this end we construct exhaustive sectoral and plant level panel data and use...

This paper analyses the impact of government grants on labour demand using plant level data for manufacturing industry in Ireland. Our data consists of a large sample of plants and their complete grant history. We provide evidence that additional employment is created over and above the level...

This paper investigates whether knowledge accumulating activities, such as exporting, R&D, or worker training, can enhance plants' productivity. To this end, we use plant-level panel data for Irish manufacturing. Our results importantly indicate that productivity enhancing effects of these...

In this paper we provide empirical evidence on the determinants of firm start-up size using data for the manufacturing sector in Ireland, and compare our results with recent findings for Portuguese manufacturing industries (Mata and Machado, 1996). To allow for firm heterogeneity between firm...

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported...