Since Schumpeter, there has been a long-standing debate regarding the optimal firm size for innovation. Empirical results have settled into a puzzle: R&D spending increasing with scale while R&D productivity decreases with scale. Thus large firms appear irrational. We propose the puzzle stems from the fact that product and patent counts undercount large firm innovation. To test that proposition...

In this paper we analyze the levels of technical efficiency and productivity growth attained by Spanish insurance companies during a period of deregulation. We compute Malmquist productivity indexes using the estimates of parametric distance function for several specialized insurance branches. In this way, we show that branch specialization matters a great deal and that firms combining two or t...

We examine the relationships between productivity growth, IT investment and organisational change (∆Ο) 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 ∆Ο is omitted; when ∆Ο is included the IT returns are greatly reduced, (b) IT and ∆Ο interact in their effect on productivity growth, (c) no...

This paper follows a knowledge production function approach to assess the contribution of R&D spending, the purchase of new machinery, and producers-users interaction to the productivity performance of German and Italian firms in manufacturing. For this purpose it employs micro-aggregated data from the First Community Innovation Survey. The regression analysis confirms the results of previous s...

Empirical evidence confirms that trade exposure can shift resources towards the most efficient firms in an industry and induce substantial increases in aggregate productivity. Although recent studies document that much of world trade is controlled by multinational firms, few examine the effect of foreign direct investment decisions on resource allocation and aggregate productivity. This paper p...

This study estimates the change in productivity of Chinese state enterprises during 1983–87 using a panel data set of 403 firms. A new approach to productivity measurement is used. Under this approach, the production functions can differ arbitrarily across firms, important given the heterogeneity of the sample. The resulting coefficients estimate the marginal products of each factor as well as ...

Labor productivity was studied at the microscopic level in terms of distributions based on individual firm financial data from Japan and the US. A power-law distribution in terms of firms and sector productivity was found in both countries’ data. The labor productivities were not equal for nation and sectors, in contrast to the prevailing view in the field of economics. It was found that the lo...

This paper examines the impact of privatization on gender discrimination in China across firms with different technology intensities. Using a comprehensive firm-level survey, the paper identifies gender wage-productivity differentials by directly estimating the relative productivity levels of workers from the production function of firms. The panel structure of the survey is taken advantage of ...

The Japanese government initiated a series of regulatory reforms in the mid-1990s. The Japanese urban gas industry consists of various sized private and non-private firms. Numerous previous studies find that deregulation leads to productivity improvements. We extend the literature by analyzing deregulation, privatization, and other aspects of a regulated industry using unique firm level data. T...

Using firm-level census data, this paper examines the spillover effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic firms in the Chinese manufacturing industry between 2000 and 2003. We find that FDI has a significant positive spillover on industry productivity that decreases as the share of FDI in the industry increases. These positive spillovers are more likely to occur through forward lin...