This paper studies the impact of size on labor cost and productivity for Italian manufacturing firms. The distributions of both labor cost and productivity display a wide support, even when disaggregated by sector of industrial activity. Further, both labor cost and productivity, when considered...

In this paper we provide an analysis of the process of creative destruction across 24 countries and 2-digit industries over the past decade. We rely on a newly assembled dataset that draws from different micro data sources (business registers, census, or representative enterprise surveys). The...

This paper advances understanding of the relationship between tax policy and productivity, taking advantage of unique data from the Dominican Republic to document a significant negative impact of tax regulations on total factor productivity (TFP). It begins by estimating productivity using...

The superstar firms model provides a compelling explanation for two simultaneously occurring phenomena: the rise of concentration in industries and the fall of labor shares. Our empirical analysis confirms two of the underlying assumptions of the model: the market share increases and the labor...

We develop a new econometric framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation among the three unrestricted. We do this by systematically exploiting assumptions that are implicit in previous firm-level productivity...

The importance of different sized firms in the process of development is significantly determined by different firm types. In order to detect the changes in industry character the author assumes that the differences in productivity among different sized firms indicate the very character of the...

Many manufacturing industries, including the computer industry, have seen large increases in productivity growth rates and have experienced a reduction in average establishment size and a decrease in the variance of the sizes of plants. A vintage capital model is introduced where learning...

There is wide variation in the sizes of manufacturing plants, even within the most narrowly defined industry classifications used by statistical agencies. Standard theories attribute all such size differences to productivity differences. This paper develops an alternative theory in which...

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies this to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with exactly 50 or more employees....

Several recent studies have shown that not only exporters but also importers perform better than firms that do not trade. Using a detailed firm level dataset from 43 developing countries, I show that there are persistent differences in evolution of firms when they are grouped according to their...