The process of the East-West integration has come to a point that enlargement appears inevitable. But are these countries really ready to join the EU in terms of competitive performance? Firstly, we construct a virtual best practice production frontier for .rms active in a European Union member...

In most transition countries the aggregate level evidence suggests that most industries are just destroying jobs, due to the legacy of communism where overmanning levels of employment were the norm. This paper sheds light on whether the transition process in Slovenian manufacturing has been one...

I use matched sampling techniques to analyze whether firms that start exporting become more productive. To this end, I use micro data of Slovenian manufacturing firms operating between the period 1994-2000. I estimate total factor productivity using the Olley-Pakes correction for sample...

Learning by exporting refers to the mechanism whereby a firm's performance improves after entering export markets. This mechanism is often mentioned in policy documents, but many econometric studies have not found corroborating evidence. I show that the econometric methods rely on an assumption...

This paper examines how prices, markups and marginal costs respond to trade liberalization. We develop a framework to estimate markups from production data with mult-product firms. This apporoach does not require assumptions on the market structure or demand curves faced by the firms, nor...

This paper studies the role of technology and competition in industry-wide productivity growth. We rely on a unique producer-level dataset covering U.S. steel producers between 1963 and 2002 to measure the impact of a drastic new production technology, the minimill, on aggregate productivity. In...

Estimating markups has a long tradition in industrial organization and international trade. Economists and policy makers are interested in measuring the effect of various competition and trade policies on market power, typically measured by markups. The empirical methods that were developed in...

We measure the impact of a drastic new technology for producing steel--the minimill--on industry-wide productivity in the US steel industry, using unique plant-level data between 1963 and 2002. The sharp increase in the industry's productivity is linked to this new technology through two...

In most transition countries the aggregate level evidence suggests that most industries are just destroying jobs, due to the legacy of communism where over-manning levels of employment were the norm. This paper sheds light on whether the transition process in Slovenian manufacturing has been one...

In most transition countries the aggregate level evidence suggests that most industries are just destroying jobs, due to the legacy of communism where ovfirmanning levels of employment were the nfirm. This paper sheds light on whether the transition process in Slovenian manufacturing has been...