Irish industrial policy explicitly encouraged job generation in certain “designated” areas via, amongst other things, preferential grant treatment, job targets and the building of advance factories in the IDA’s (Industrial Development Authority) regional industrial plans of 1973-1977 and...

In a recent paper, [Cabral, L. M. B. and J. Mata, 2003, American Economic Review, <Emphasis Type="Bold">93, 1075–1090] using Portuguese manufacturing data have shown for the first time that the plant size distribution is significantly right-skewed at the early part of the life cycle and then changes to become more...</emphasis>

In this paper we provide empirical evidence on the determinants of firm start-up size using data for the manufacturing sector in Ireland, and compare our results with recent findings for Portuguese manufacturing industries (Mata and Machado, 1996). To allow for firm heterogeneity between firm...

According to the 'convergence hypothesis' multinational companies will tend to displace national firms and trade as total market size increases and as countries converge in relative size, factor endowments, and production costs. Using a recent model developed by Markusen and Venables (1998) as a...

This paper examines whether financial assistance provided by government induces firms to spend more of their own funds on training expenditures, using plant-level data for the Republic of Ireland. We pay particular attention to the potential problems in such an evaluation study, namely...

This paper investigates whether government support can act to increase exporting activity. We use a uniquely rich data set on Irish manufacturing plants and employ an empirical strategy that combines a nonparametric matching procedure with a difference-in-differences estimator in order to deal...

This paper investigates the link between nationality of ownership and wage elasticities of labour demand at the level of the plant. In particular, we examine whether labour demand in multinationals becomes less elastic with respect to the wage if the plant has backward linkages with the local...