This paper explores the relationship between economic performance and US unionism, focusing first on what we do and do not know based on empirical research handicapped by limited data on establishment and firm level collective bargaining coverage. Evidence on the relationship of unions with...

We claim that the standard methodology to study the effects of the reallocation of factors on growth is not adequate in the presence of biased innovations. Labor-saving innovations increase output per worker and may decrease the marginal productivity of labor. Therefore, a reallocation of labor...

This paper investigates the empirical link between emission intensity and economic growth, using a very large data set of 61,219 Italian manufacturing firms over the period 2000-2004. As a measure of lagged environmental performance (efficiency) at firm level we exploit NAMEA sector for CO2,...

How does organizational higher purpose affect employee behavior and firm output? We develop an optimal-contracting model which shows that pursuing organizational higher purpose dissipates agency frictions, lowers wage costs and elicits higher employee effort. The effect on profits, however,...

This longitudinal study of large European firms (1993-2007) offers a conceptual model that explains how two key aspects of the macro-competitive environment, macroeconomic growth and foreign competition, shape product and international diversification. The results indicate that greater foreign...

We present a model to explain why in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe an important output fall has been associated with price liberalization. Its key ingredients are search frictions and Williamsonian relation-specific investment, implying that new investments are made only...

We investigate the effects of input variety creation and destruction on both micro- and macroeconomic outcomes using detailed data from Belgium. Our microeconomic analysis establishes that the elasticity of downstream firms' marginal cost to supplier separation captures the area under the input...

Empirical studies showed that firm-level volatility has been increasing but the aggregate volatility has been decreasing in the US for the post-war period. This paper proposes a unified explanation for these diverging trends. Our explanation is based on a story of financial development -...