This paper investigates how economies of scope in multi-product firms interact with comparative advantage in determining the effect of trade liberalisation on resource reallocation, using Belgian manufacturing firm- and firm-product-level data over the period 1997-2007. We first provide evidence...

This paper examines whether multinational companies differ in their employment adjustment from domestic firms, on the basis of a panel of Belgian firms for the period 1997-2007. We focus on incumbent firms as, in general, they account for the largest fraction of net employment creation,...

This paper revisits the "footloose" nature of multinational firms (MNFs) hypothesis. Using firm-level data for Belgium over the period 1997-2008, we rely on a Probit model and take into account the endogeneity of the determinants of firm exit. Our results may be summarised as follows. First, the...

We use a unique longitudinal dataset that tracks the exporting behavior of Belgian manufacturing firms between 1997 and 2009. We ask how slack resources, including financial and human resource slack, influence firms’ exporting behavior. Our findings suggest that both types of slack resources...

Policy-making institutions such as the European Commission, the ECB and the OECD often use unit labor costs as a measure of international competitiveness. The goal of this paper is to examine how well this measure is related to international export performance at the firm level. To this end, we...

We evaluate the impact of international competition on firm-level perfor- mance in Belgium. In the manufacturing sector we consider both the impact of global competition through measures of import penetration and the impact of within-EU competitiveness using measures of relative labor cost. In...

We test whether firms with a single bank are better shielded from loss of credit and investment cuts in periods of adverse cash flow shocks than firms with multiple bank relationships. Our estimates of the cash flow sensitivity of investment show that both types of firms are equally subject to...

This paper examines whether differences in wage rigidity across sectors can be explained by differences in workforce composition, competition, technology and wage-bargaining institutions. We adopt the measure of downward real wage rigidity (DRWR) developed by Dickens and Goette (2006) and rely...

Using firm-level data for Belgium over the period 1997-2005, we evaluate the elasticity of firms' labour and real average labour compensation to microeconomic total factor productivity (TFP). Our results may be summarised as follows. First, we find that the elasticity of average labour...

In this paper we investigate how demand and output price uncertainty affect investment plans of Belgian manufacturing firms. We obtain time-varying uncertainty measures at the firm and industry level from the Belgian monthly business cycle survey and investment plans from the half-yearly...