What is the effect of imports on productivity? To answer this question, we estimate a structural model of producers using product-level import data for a panel of Hungarian manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2001. In our model with heterogenous firms, producers choose to import or purchase...

Highlights: The European Union growth agenda has become even more pressing because growth is needed to support public and private sector deleveraging, reduce the fragility of the banking sector, counter the falling behind of southern European countries and prove that Europe is still a worthwhile...

We exploit a panel dataset of Hungarian firms merged with product-level trade data for the period 1992-2003 to investigate the relation between firms' trading activities (importing, exporting or both) and productivity. We find important self-selection effects of the most productive firms induced...

The aim of this paper is to provide a microeconometric analysis of the impact of research joint venture participation on productivity, using a large panel of around 6200 firms. The findings of the theoretical literature on this topic are ambiguous and there are very few empirical papers...

Firms cluster their economic activities to exploit technological and informational spillovers from other firms. Spillovers through the entry of multinational firms can be particularly beneficial to domestic firms because of their technological superiority. Yet, the importance of foreign firm's...

In the paper, we test the effect of local development, regional and local policies on the location decisions and productivity of firms. Development indicators include local research and development activity or education while policy decisions used in this study encompass for example tax rates,...

In his 1966 Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge, entitled On the Causes of the Slow Rate of Economic Growth in the UK, the Hungarian-born British economist, Nicholas Kaldor presented a series of "laws" to account for the growth rate differences between Britain on the one hand, and the more successful...

We estimate the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) acquisitions on firm-average and worker-specific wages using universal firm-level panel data and linked employer-employee data for Hungary. Our identification strategy exploits a 23 year-long panel with 4,926 foreign acquisitions to...

We provide new empirical evidence on the link between age and productivity using a transitional context. Building on a model of skill obsolescence, we assess the long-term adjustment process following a sudden change in skills needed in production that severely worsened older workers' labor...