This paper examines the causal relationship between foreign mergers and acquisitions and firm productivity in the UK over the period 1999-2007. Our results raise questions about the existence of aggregate effects of foreign ownership on TFP in the longer-run. However, we find significant...

The measurement of academic output in Ireland is of growing interest in the context of the government's strategy to identify and support centres of research excellence and to encourage inter-institutional collaboration in both research and fourth- level education. This paper looks at research...

Recent economic literature suggests the importance of sunk costs and hysteresis in explaining export patterns in international trade. To explore their empirical importance, we present a new conceptual framework that distinguishes six different types of exporter behaviour, and apply this...

This paper combines a literature identifying the sources of productivity growth with a literature exploring differences between the characteristics of exporters and non-exporters to examine the contributions of exporters and non-exporters to aggregate labour productivity growth in the Irish...

This paper examines the causal relationship between foreign mergers and acquisitions and firm productivity in the UK over the period 1999-2007. Our results raise questions about the existence of aggregate effects of foreign ownership on TFP in the longer-run. However, we find significant...

Is Research and Development activity an important determinant of the probability that a plant will survive? We model the survival of a cohort of Indigenous plants over the period 1986 to 1996 as a function of sectoral and firm characteristics. We use a firm-level dataset provided by Forfás, the...

This paper analyses the sectoral distribution of US investment across EU member countries. We attempt to determine whether investment is sectorally concentrated by country and whether there seems to be any evidence of increased sectoral specialisation in US investment as the EU market has become...

This paper examines possible productivity spillovers from foreign-owned firms to indigenous firms in the manufacturing sector in Ireland, using a firm-level panel of all firms in the Irish manufacturing sector over the period 1991-1998. The approach commonly applied in the literature to examine...

This paper uses micro-data to examine the relationship between R&D activity and employment growth. The R&D and employment data used are drawn from a survey of the Irish manufacturing sector undertaken by Forfás, the policy and advisory board for industrial development in Ireland. By...