Based on three case studies, a new Lean financial model is developed. This new model improves the organization by increasing Lean goal congruent behavior. The new financial (costing) model uses the waste categories known from Lean in order to create decision information for Lean decisions such...

This study empirically explores whether the propensity to offshore affects the total domestic employment at the firm level. The analysis is based on a Finnish weighted sample of 652 firms and screens the effect of offshoring different kinds of tasks. Two main channels of offshoring tasks are...

Our empirical literature review shows that little is known about how firm performance changes with age, presumably because of the paucity of data on firm age. For Spanish manufacturing firms, we analyse the firm performance related to firm age between 1998 and 2006. We find evidence that firms...

This paper presents a multidimensional empirical analysis of firm growth. Exploiting census data on Italian manufacturing firms, 1989-1997, we estimate a reduced-form VAR to analyze the co-evolution of employment growth, sales growth, growth of profits and labour productivity growth. Our main...

We study how foreign competition affects the composition of investments inside firms. A parsimonious model predicts that firms have an incentive to shift their investments towards more short-term assets when exposed to tougher competition. Using data on expenditures of listed US companies into...

This article explores the dynamics of market selection by investigating of the relationships linking productivity, profitability, investment and growth, based on China's manufacturing firm-level dataset over the period 1998 - 2007. First, we find that productivity variations, rather than...

Using a matched employer-employee data-set, we analyze how workforce diversity in terms of cultural background, education and demographic characteristics affects the productivity of firms in Denmark. Implementing a structural estimation of the firms' production function (Ackerberg et al. 2006),...

The new type of industrialization called Industry 4.0 is gaining increasing importance for manufacturing and service firms alike. Industry 4.0 is characterized by the interconnection between different information and communication technologies and between production facilities such as machines,...

This paper investigates how financial constraints affect a firm's decision on whether to conduct product innovation. Theoretically, we show that a firm's optimal decision on product innovation is a function of its past decision, financial constraints and a set of control variables. Through...

This paper investigates whether firms innovate persistently or discontinuously over time using an innovation panel data set on German manufacturing and service firms for the period 1994-2002. We find that innovation behaviour is permanent at the firm-level to a very large extent. Using a dynamic...