This paper examines the impact of trade and fiscal reforms and of the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc on enterprise development in Chad and Gabon. These reforms provide a natural experiment to assess the impact of trade liberalisation in countries with a small and backward manufacturing...

China's policy of encouraging export processing has been the topic of much discussion in the academic literature and policy debate. We use a recently developed econometric approach that allows for time varying "treatments" and estimate economically and statistically significant positive causal...

The new trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms (“stealing”) in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements (“learning”). The authors use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized...

Chinese firms faced an all-around trade liberalization process during the early 2000s: lower barriers from other countries on Chinese goods, and lower Chinese barriers on other countries' goods and inputs. Using novel firm-level tariff data for trading Chinese manufacturing firms, this paper...

This paper brings new evidence on the impact of services liberalization on performance of manufacturing firms. Using a unique database of Ukrainian firms in 2001-2007, we utilize an external push for liberalization in services sector as a source of exogenous variation to identify the impact of...

Insights from industrial organization, Schumpeterian innovation, and economic development theories are used to try to explain firm behavior in cases of successful acquisition of advanced technological assets and international trade competitiveness by Asian and Latin-American countries at an...

Will export affect corporate innovation? Using comprehensive data from 2002 to 2016, we find that Chinese firms file more patents in response to international demand. To establish causality, we explore exogenous shock in exchange rate policy in 2005, which converts from a fixed regime into a...

We study the implications of robot adoption at the level of individual firms using a rich panel data-set of Spanish manufacturing firms over a 27-year period (1990-2016). We focus on three central questions: (1) Which firms adopt robots? (2) What are the labor market effects of robot adoption at...

Firm turnover (i.e. firm entry and exit) is a well-recognized source of sectorlevel productivity growth across developing and developed countries. In contrast, the role and importance of firms switching activities from one sector to another is little understood. Firm switchers are likely to be...

The main objectives of this paper is (i) to determine factors that support engagement in innovative activities by Rwandese manufacturing firms; (ii) to assess effects of innovation decision on innovation performance of Rwandese manufacturing firms; and (iii) to evaluate impacts of innovation...