Many sectors of the UK economy experienced rapid productivity growth over the 1980's. This coincided with an increase in the flow of inward investment. Studies using macro data have linked these two events. This paper investigates what has happened in one industry at the microeconomic level and...

This paper explores the evolution of the average wage of employees over the life-cycle of a manufacturing plant. The average wage starts out low for a new plant and increases along with labor productivity as the plant ages. As a plant approaches exit, its average wage falls, but more slowly than...

In this paper, we develop a two-sector general equilibrium trade model which includes offshoring, sequential production, and endogenous market structures. We analyze how relative factor endowments and various forms of globalization and technological change affect equilibrium offshoring patterns....

This paper studies the relationship between export activities and firm-level productivity. Unique matching of German and Austrian micro data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that exporters are more productive by around 40 percent compared with non-exporters. Moreover, beside other analysis techniques,...

Results from empirical studies of firm behavior are synthesized into, a theory of the firm as a competent team. I demonstrate the existence of a tacit organizational competence exercising a leverage on the productivities of all other factors through selecting and allocating competent people,...

We explore the nature of Business Groups, that is network-like forms of hierarchical organization between legally autonomous …rms spanning both within and across national borders. Exploiting a unique dataset of 270,474 headquarters controlling more than 1,500,000 (domestic and foreign) a¢...

If the relation between investment and economic growth is well established in the macroeconomic literature, the existence of a similar link at the level of the firm has been challenged by empirical work. This paper investigates the channels linking investment and firm performance in the French...

Agents' decisions to exert effort depends on the provided incentives as well as the potential costs for doing so. So far most of the attention has been on the incentive side. However, our lab experiments underline that both the incentive and cost side can be used separately to shape work...

Can the existence of positive productivity spillovers between co-workers be explained by the presence of complementarities in a firm's production function? A simple model demonstrates that this is possible when workers perform their tasks sequentially and part of individuals' pay is determined...

As cities increasingly become centers of economic growth and innovation, there is a need to understand their inner workings and organization in greater detail. We use ge-coded firm-level panel data at the sub-city level to assess the long-standing question whether agglomeration economies derive...