Female-run firms are less likely to be exporters although they exert positive influence in various aspects in an economy and society. With a new and comprehensive data set on manufacturing plants, I investigate the exporter productivity premium of female-run firms in Germany. The results show...

This paper revisits the empirical evidence about the link between firms' performance and their international status, based on a large sample of Italian enterprises. To this purpose, we merged two waves of the Capitalia survey (1998-2000, and 2001-2003) retrieving firm level data for roughly...

We develop and structurally estimate a model of heterogeneous multiproduct firms that can be used to decompose the firm-size distribution into the contributions of costs, “appeal” (quality or taste), markups, and product scope. Using Nielsen bar-code data on prices and sales, we find that...

Gains from trade due to exporting can result from the reallocation of resources to more productive producers, or from efficiency increases within exporting firms over time. While there is strong evidence for the former, the latter has received little support in the data. Previous research has...

This paper investigates the relative impact of microeconomic agglomeration mechanisms on plant's total factor productivity (TFP) using German establishment and employment level data. Contrasting different strategies to estimate TFP from plant level production functions reveals that not...

This paper establishes a causal link between the emigration of skilled workers and firm performance in source countries. Using firm-level panel data from ten Eastern European countries, we show that the emigration of skilled workers lowers firm total factor productivity. We exploit time,...

The Italian economy has been struggling with low productivity growth and bank balance sheet strains. This paper examines the implications for firm productivity of adverse shocks to bank lending in Italy, using a novel identification scheme and loan-level data on syndicated lending. We exploit...

In this paper a semiparametric stochastic metafrontier approach is used to obtain insight into firmlevel competitiveness in Europe. We differ from standard TFP studies at the firm level as we simultaneously allow for inefficiency, noise and do not impose a functional form on the input-output...

Slow productivity growth in advanced economies holds back income gains and therefore improvements in well-being. Sluggish productivity gains in aggregate hide a growing gap between firms at the frontier, which display sustained productivity growth, and the rest of firms whose productivity...