We provide a novel set of stylized facts on firms engaging in international trade in services, using unique data on firm-level exports and imports from the world's second largest services exporter, the United Kingdom (UK). We show that only a fraction of UK firms engage in international trade in...

In many OECD countries, low productivity growth has coincided with rising inequality. Widening wage and productivity gaps between firms may have contributed to both developments. This paper uses a new harmonised cross-country linked employer-employee dataset for 14 OECD countries to analyse the...

Case study evidence suggests that exporting firms learn from their clients. But econometric evidence, mostly using exporting and TFP growth, is mixed. We use a UK panel data set with firm-level information on exporting and productivity. Our innovation is that we also have direct data on the...

We examine the relationships between productivity growth, IT investment and organisational change (∆O) using UK firm data. Consistent with the small number of other micro studies we find (a) IT appears to have high returns in a growth accounting sense when ∆O is omitted; when ∆O is included...

Changes in information and communication technologieshave increased the offshorability of tasks.As routine tasks (Pol Antràs, Luis Garicano and EstebanRossi-Hansberg, 2006) and lower offshoring-costtasks (Gene Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg,2008) move abroad, production processes become...

An organization will often use a specialized technical language that is un-derstood by its members but not by others. We develop a theory of optimalorganizational languages and identify a key trade-o¤ between facilitatinginternal communication and encouraging communication with other...

We provide a novel set of stylized facts on firms engaging in international trade in services, using unique firm-level data on services exports and imports in the United Kingdom in 2000- 2005. Less than 10% of firms trade in services but they can be found in all sectors of the UK economy. While...