Productivity growth has slowed in most Western countries, a reality well known in the economic literature, and the slowdown is likely to persist for some time. This paper investigates the impact of this phenomenon on export performance, with a particular focus on its heterogeneity across...

Financial institutions are key to allocate capital to its most productive uses. In order to examine the relationship between productivity and bank credit in the context of different financial market set-ups, we introduce a model of overlapping generations of entrepreneurs under complete and...

We model an industry in which a discrete number of firms choose the output of their differentiated products deciding whether or not to consider the impact of their decisions on aggregate output. We show that two threshold numbers of firms exist such that: below the lower one there is a unique...

This paper explores the impact of immigrants on the imports, exports and productivity of service-producing firms in the U.K. Immigrants may substitute for imported intermediate inputs (offshore production) and they may impact the productivity of the firm as well as its export behavior. The first...

Especially in developing countries credit constraints are often perceived as one of the most important market frictions constraining firm innovation and growth. Huge amounts of public money are being devoted to the removal of such constraints but their effectiveness is still subject to an...

This paper estimates the effects of immigration on wages of native workers at the national U.S. level. Following Borjas (2003) we focus on national labor markets for workers of different skills and we enrich his methodology and refine previous estimates. We emphasize that a production function...

We adopt a general equilibrium approach in order to measure the effects of recent immigration on the Western German labor market, looking at both wage and employment effects. Using the Regional File of the IAB Employment Subsample for the period 1987-2001, we find that the substantial...

This paper asks the following question: what was the effect of surging immigration on average and individual wages of U.S.-born workers during the period 1990-2004? We emphasize the need for a general equilibrium approach to analyze this problem. The impact of immigrants on wages of U.S.-born...

Recent influential empirical work has emphasized the negative impact immigrants have on the wages of U.S.-born workers, arguing that immigration harms less educated American workers in particular and all U.S.-born workers in general. Because U.S. and foreign born workers belong to different...

We develop a monopolistically competitive model of trade with firm heterogeneity - in terms of productivity differences - and endogenous differences in the 'toughness' of competition across markets - in terms of the number and average productivity of competing firms. We analyze how these...