Plant shutdowns shape industry productivity, the dynamics of employment, and industrial restructuring. Plant closures account for more than half of gross job destruction in U.S. manufacturing. This paper examines the effects of firm structure on U.S. manufacturing plant closures. Plants belonging to multiplant firms and those owned by U.S. multinationals are less likely to exit. However, the su...

Plant shutdowns shape industry productivity, the dynamics of employment, and industrial restructuring. Plant closures account for more than half of gross job destruction in US manufacturing. This paper examines the effects of firm structure on US manufacturing plant closures. Plants belonging to multi-plant firms and those owned by US multinationals are less likely to exit. However, the superio...

Unlike in the past where industrial policy was either focused on creation and growth of stateowned firms or alternatively consisted merely of broadly functional policies without consideration for firm or entrepreneurial specifics, the requirement now is that future industrial policy ought to be a nuanced partnership between entrepreneurs and the state. In this paper we outline some consideratio...

Inherent Safety is generally recognised as an important concept in the design of chemical plants. It is, however, often regarded as the sole province of engineers. Inspired by the successful development in the last decade from cleaner technology towards cleaner production, we explored in this research the feasibility of what we call Inherently Safer Production. Four pilot cases were carried out...

This paper investigates whether exporting firms in Chinese manufacturing sector pay higher average wages than non-exporting firms by analyzing a large firm-level dataset derived from the Chinese Industrial Census in 2004. Through rigorous exercises involving robust regressions, quantile regressions and nonparametric matching estimators, we find that the wage premium of exporting activities is n...

Industrial policy is no longer what it used to be. In the industrialized world and in advanced developing countries alike, the focus has shifted from a top-down, statist approach that sought to create industries to a decentralized, networked approach whose aim is to shape competitive advantages and to create "systemic competitiveness." This reflects the fact that globalization and localization ...

Unlike in the past where industrial policy was either focused on creation and growth of state-owned firms or alternatively consisted merely of broadly functional policies without consideration for firm or entrepreneurial specifics, the requirement now is that future industrial policy ought to be a nuanced partnership between entrepreneurs and the state. In this paperwe outline some consideratio...

In this paper we investigate the link between optimal level of leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. Using the model of firm’s value maximization, we show that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases, captured by an increase in the variability of industrial production or inflation, firms decrease their optimal levels of borrowing. We test this prediction on a panel of non–financial US firms dr...

Hunt’s (1972) observation of asymmetric strategies pursued by strategic groups of firms in the U.S. white goods industry more than three decades ago sparked an explosion of industry and cross-industry studies. Departing somewhat from the prevailing industrial organization logic of that time, strategic groups—clusters of firms pursuing similar competitive strategies (Porter, 1980)—represent diff...

I use within-firm, plant-level data combined with geographic information on firms’ overseas operations to examine how investment in low-wage economies affects firms’ homecountry operations. To remain close to theory I focus on changes in firms’ organisational and industrial structure driven by plant closures. As predicted by models of vertical multinationals I find that investment in relatively...