Employee matching grant schemes are coordination mechanisms that reduce free-riding by socially-conscious employee-donors. Their prevalence demonstrates that socially-responsible firms can survive market competition. When socially-conscious employees are more productive or value working together, matching schemes can enhance employee welfare and raise more for charities without reducing investo...

This paper develops a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms to study the interaction between technology adoption and trade in a world of two countries facing different technology adoption costs. It shows that a reduction in the technology adoption cost in one country increases the productivity, induces more firms to adopt advanced technology, and improves welfare in this count...

In this paper constraints on technology choice and credit access are introduced into the Melitz (2003) model in a dynamic setting in order to explain the factors that limit the benefits to a firm from trade liberalization. Theoretical analysis shows that firms face credit constraints depending on their initial productivity and the cost of the credit. As a result, credit constrained firms may ne...

We investigate the long-run impact of environmental regulations on the intraindustry distribution of firm-level productivity and the resulting aggregate variables. In a general-equilibrium model that accounts for endogenous entry/exit of heterogeneous firms, neither the average productivity of firms nor the mass of firms is independent of the choice of policy instruments (i.e. emissions tax vs....

Industry-Wide Work Rules and Productivity: Evidence from Argentine Union Contract Data In the early 1990’s, the Argentine government promoted a framework for productivity-based negotiations between firms and unions at low levels of organization. The policy weakened the industry-wide collective bargaining system, which sets working conditions for all firms in an industry. This paper employs newl...

This chapter investigates whether the best firms become exporters or whether a firm becomes better as a result of being an exporter. The evidence reviewed suggests that productivity growth in exporting firms generally occurs before rather than after the firm starts to export. It concludes that policy intervention to encourage exports is often useful, in particular where firms don’t recognise th...

The paper provides empirical evidence for the causal impact of broadband Internet on firms’ labour productivity and realised process and product innovations. The analysis refers to the early phase of DSL expansion in Germany from 2001 to 2003, when roughly 60 percent of the German firms already used broadband Internet. Identification relies on instrumental variable estimation taking advantage o...

The presence of foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) can benefit local economies. In particular, if MNEs are very productive compared to domestic firms, they may promote learning and catch-up of local firms. Such a channel of spillovers fromMNEs to local firms is known as the Veblen-Geschenkron effect. Rather than the overall density of MNEs in a region or sector, it is their initial produc...

Using a panel of 21,582 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005, we examine the relationship between the degree of foreign ownership and corporate performance in recipient firms. We find that foreign ownership is positively associated with firms’ return on assets, return on sales, labor productivity, and total factor productivity. Yet, the relationship exhibits an inverted U-shaped pattern: cor...

Empirical work has drawn attention to the high degree of productivity differences within industries, and its role in resource allocation. This paper examines the allocational efficiency of such markets. Productivity differences introduce two new sources of potential inefficiency: selection of the right distribution of firms and allocation of the right quantities across firms. We show that these...