Product service plays a crucial role for brands to retain customers and spur revenue growth. It is, however, often outsourced to a third-party supplier, driven by cost savings and the ability to focus on core businesses. While there is a large body of literature studying service outsourcing, the...

Production functions provide a mapping from the firms' input quantity and productivity to output quantity. This mapping only generates unbiased estimates if input and output quality variation within and between observation units is accounted for. I review and classify state-of-the-art methods to...

We study productivity-level distributions of manufacturing firms in France and Germany, and how these distributions evolved across the Great Recession. We show the presence of a systematic productivity advantage of German firms over French ones in the decade 2003-2013, but the gap has narrowed...