Especially in developing countries credit constraints are often perceived as one of the most important market frictions constraining firm innovation and growth. Huge amounts of public money are being devoted to the removal of such constraints but their effectiveness is still subject to an...

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether Brazilian manufacturing firms are credit constrained. We exploit a rich database that contains more than three thousand firms with characteristics that may affect their degree of credit constraint: size, being listed in the Brazilian stock market...

This paper uses the sudden surge in Chinese competition faced by Brazil's manufacturers in the 2000s to revisit the findings from the literature on how productivity, innovation, and employment were impacted by the Great Liberalizationa period of massive trade opening in the early 1990s in Latin...

This paper introduces a trade cost asymmetry into the Core-periphery model to investigate the location effects of protection. Trade costs arise from the active choice of governments. In the case of a country that can decide the level of barriers to imports without retaliation by the other...

As policymakers refocus on growth, the ability to take a firm-level view is key to disentangling the various factors at the root of competitiveness, and thus to designing appropriate policies. Firm-level data provides critical information for the design of appropriate competitiveness measures...

This paper aims to enrich the standard toolbox for measuring diversity in economics. In so doing, we compare the indicators of diversity used by economists with those used by biologists and ecologists. Ecologists and biologists are concerned about biodiversity: the diversity of organisms that...

This report constitutes the first deliverable of the project ENGIME - Economic Growth and Innovation in Multicultural Environments, financed by the European Commission - FP5 - Key Action: Improving socio-economic knowledge base. Contract HPSE-CT2001-50007

The impact of offshoring on domestic jobs is more complicated than it first appears. In the standard narrative, offshoring production is thought to harm domestic workers by providing cheap alternative sources of labor. However, while offshoring may directly displace domestic workers, the...

We adopt a general equilibrium approach in order to measure the effects of recent immigration on the Western German labour market, looking at both wage and employment effects. Using the Regional File of the IAB Employment Subsample for the period 1987-2001, we find that the substantial...

What determines a country's ability to compete in international markets? What fosters the global competitiveness of its firms? And in the European context, have key elements of the EU strategy such as EMU and enlargement helped or hindered domestic firms' competitiveness in local and global...