Using the universe of firms in Estonia, we study the implications of imports-led and FDI- facilitated automation for productivity and factor shares of tasks and value-added. First, in contrast to the findings for developed economies, we find that the aggregate labour share of value-added for...

Most research into the relation between competition and management accounting information and control systems focuses on the overall intensity of an organization's competitive environment. Little research considers the dimensions of cost allocation methods or the individual dimensions of the...

This paper presents a set of facts on the cyclicality of firm births and deaths in the U.S. during the period 1979--2013. Asymmetry in the cyclicality between firm birth and firm death is observed: aggregate firm birth is generally significantly procyclical, while the (counter-)cyclicality in...

The growth of business firms is an example of a system of complex interacting units that resembles complex interacting systems in nature such as earthquakes. Remarkably, work in econophysics has provided evidence that the statistical properties of the growth of business firms follow the same...

I investigate changes in product scope, the number of products that a firm offers, over the business cycle and decompose the impact of such changes on aggregate output. By using the Nielsen Retail Scanner data of U.S. consumer goods purchases for 2007- 2014, I find that firm product scope is an...

In this paper, we study a new channel to explain firms' price setting behavior. We propose that uncertainty about factor prices has a positive effect on markups. We show theoretically that firms with higher shares of inputs with volatile prices set higher markups. We use the Bartik shift-share...

This paper analyzes the implications of plant-level dynamics over the business cycle. We first document basic patterns of entry and exit of U.S. manufacturing plants, in terms of employment and productivity, between 1972 and 1997. We show how entry and exit patterns vary during the business...

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...

Product scope adjustment is a key mechanism through which multi-product firms achieve efficient resource allocations. In this paper, we take a novel perspective to study firms' product scope adjustment behavior through the lens of asset pricing. Using a unique panel scanner data set containing...

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...