The goal of this project was twofold. The first objective was to find out to what extent publicly available beneficiary data (from managing authorities and commercial databases) could be used for quantitative, econometric counterfactual analysis. This led to a second objective: in the countries...

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...