Concentration has increased over the last 30 years or so in a variety of industries. This development has raised concern about weakened competition and resulting harm to consumers. Calls for tougher antitrust enforcement have become louder. There is also concern that rising concentration may be...

This paper investigates the relationship between firm heterogeneity and a firm's decision to export, using the annual survey of Thai manufacturing firms from 2001 to 2004. A significant contribution of this paper is that we are, for the first time, able to break down FDI by country of origin to...

This study uses firm level data from two detailed surveys of Italian manufacturing firms to study the relationship between R&D expenditures and productivity growth. The analysis considers the different contributions of various forms of R&D (product, process, internal, external in collaboration...

Firm entry and exit play a crucial role in spurring a reallocation of resources across firms as tariffs are reduced. In the light of the substantial trade reforms implemented in the Philippines over the last two decades, the paper examines the impact of trade reforms on the exit of domestic...

Our paper adds empirical evidence on the causal effects of exporting on firms' performances. Using a rich database on Italian manufacturing firms, we test the self-selection and the post-entry effects hypotheses with respect to various firms' characteristics. Our analysis supports the idea that...

This paper explores how firms' skills and organizational change affect the returns from investments in ICT. Our work contributes to the literature by testing the hypothesis of complementarity in a panel of 540 Italian manufacturing firms during 1995-2000. By drawing on different statistical...

In the paper, productivity convergence is analyzed with a broad panel of industry sector data for the United States and Germany for 1960-1990. The time-series/cross-sectoral data set allows to investigate country-specific convergence, and to control for sector-specific differences in human...

Based on a panel data set of Japanese manufacturing firms in research-intensive industries, we investigate quantitatively the extent to which debt outstandings in the 90s affected the firm's R&D activities. We find that massive debt outstandings had significantly negative effect on R&D...

This paper studies the relationship between export activities and firm-level productivity. Unique matching of German and Austrian micro data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that exporters are more productive by around 40 percent compared with non-exporters. Moreover, beside other analysis techniques,...