Contributions by investor-owned companies play major roles in financing the campaigns of candidates for elective office in the United States. We look at the presidential level and analyze contributions by companies before an election and their stock market performance following US presidential...

Heterogeneous firm productivity seems to provide an argument for governments to pursue `pick-the-winner' strategies by subsidizing highly productive firms more, or taxing them less, than their less productive counterparts. We appraise this argument by studying the optimal choice of effective tax...

This study uses detailed, reliable and up-to-date linked employer-employee data that take account of both the demand and the supply side of the labor market to challenge the conventional wisdom of a universal exporter wage premium. It investigates whether for German establishments an exporter...

This paper investigates the relative impact of microeconomic agglomeration mechanisms on plant's total factor productivity (TFP) using German establishment and employment level data. Contrasting different strategies to estimate TFP from plant level production functions reveals that not...

The risk of default that business firms face is very significant and differs widely across countries. This paper explores the links between countries' business conditions and international trade embedment and the default risk at the country level from a theoretical point of view. Our main...

Sick workers in many countries receive sick pay during their illness- related absences from the workplace. In several countries, the social security system insures firms against their workers' sickness absences. However, this insurance may create moral hazard problems for firms, leading to the...

While the role of exports in promoting growth in general, and productivity in particular, has been investigated empirically using aggregate data for countries and industries for a long time, only recently have comprehensive longitudinal data at the firm level been used to look at the extent and...

A number of recent studies nd evidence for the existence of a persistent performance gap between multinational enterprises (MNE) and their domestic competitors. Therefore, the question arises whether successful rms become MNEs or whether going abroad improves home market performance. This paper...

This paper tests some of the predictions of recent advances in trade theory that have focused on different trade patterns of firms within the same sector. Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple (2005) develop a model in which innate productivity differences between firms determine the degree of...

Most of the literature addressing multiple banking assumes equal financing shares. However, unequal, concentrated or asymmetric bank borrowing is widespread. This paper investigates the determinants of creditor concentration for German firms using a comprehensive bank-firm level dataset for the...