This chapter overviews productivity research from an industrial organization perspective. We focus on what is known and what still needs to be learned about the productivity levels and dynamics of individual producers, but also how these interact through markets and industries to influence...

Learning by exporting refers to the mechanism whereby firms improve their performance (productivity) after entering export markets. Although this mechanism is often mentioned in policy documents, a significant share of econometric studies has not found evidence for this hypothesis. This paper...

In this paper I analyze the productivity gains from trade liberalization in the Belgian textile industry. So far, empirical research has established a strong relationship between opening up to trade and productivity, relying almost entirely on deflated sales to proxy for output in the production...

We evaluate the impact of international competition on firm-level perfor- mance in Belgium. In the manufacturing sector we consider both the impact of global competition through measures of import penetration and the impact of within-EU competitiveness using measures of relative labor cost. In...

We propose an approach to measuring the misallocation of production in a market that compares actual industry cost curves to undistorted (counterfactual) supply curves. As compared to traditional, TFPR-based, misallocation measures, this approach leverages cost data, such that results are...

We analyze the aggregate markup of a small-open economy, Belgium, using a firm-level dataset that includes all non-financial, private firms. The dataset covers the period 1980-2016 and merges the annual firm accounts over three periods when firms faced different reporting thresholds for the key...