This paper examines whether importing intermediate goods improves plant performance. While addressing the issue of simultaneity of a productivity shock and decisions to import intermediates, we estimate the impact of the use of foreign intermediates on plants' productivity using plant-level...

The high real wage story is one of the leading hypotheses for how deflation caused the International Great Depression. The story is that world-wide deflation, combined with incomplete nominal wage adjustment, raised real wages in a number of countries, and these higher real wages reduced...

The objective of this paper is to measure, through econometric techniques, the existence of horizontal and vertical spillovers form Transnational Corporations presence in Uruguayan’s manufacturing sector in 1990-2000. We concluded that the factorial productivity of the firms has a...

This paper seeks to shed light on how manufacturing job flows and productivity in Argentina were affected during the 1990s by economic reforms in general and particularly by: a) financial shocks, b) labor reforms that change non-wage labor costs, c) trade reforms that alter tariff dispersion, d)...

The paper analyses how barriers to communication across social groups affect economy-wide productivity and factor accumulation. Using a dynamic model of an economy that includes a reproducible capital stock (physical or human) and effective labour, social barriers to communication are shown to...

This paper examines the performance of the U.S.~commercial banking industry over 1984--2002. Rather than measuring performance relative to the unknown (and difficult-to-estimate) boundary of the production set, performance for a given bank is measured relative to {\it expected} maximum output...

Competition has pervasive and long-lasting effects on economic performance by affecting economic actors’ incentive structures, by encouraging their innovative activities, by stimulating technology spillovers, and by selecting more efficient firms from less efficient ones over time. A...