in recent decades, foreign direct investment (fdi) has played a vital role in economic growth of developed and developing countries. fdi brings new capital and technology to the host country beside a possibility of spillover to local firms. hence, fdi is considered as an important channel of technology transfer. however, in empirical studies, the size and direction of effects of fdi on producti...

ABSTRACT An expected outcome of economic reforms in India is enhanced pace of industrialization with manufacturing sector playing a crucial role by increasing its share in output via higher investments and increased productivity. This process of industrialization was also expected to usher in possibilities for the slow growing states to catch up with the fast growing ones. This paper assesses t...

Adoption of new technology requires diversion of human and physical resources from direct production activities to learning/adjusting activities, which could reduce productivity temporarily. Focusing on the existence of such “learning cost”, we derive a simple model on the optimal timing for technology upgrading. This model suggests that, other things being equal, a firm perceived to have bette...

In this paper we utilize optimal contracts in a Lazear-Rosen tournament to experimentally examine how the selection of an incentive mechanism by managers and, likewise, the self-selection into a mechanism by employees, a§ect employee output. Depending on the treatment, those assigned the role of a principal or an agent could choose between two theoretically equivalent tournaments: a reward tour...

Age and Gender Composition of the Workforce, Productivity and Profits: Evidence from a New Type of Data for German Enterprises This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm’s workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germ...

The recent micro economic literature concerning exports has highlighted the importance of firms characteristics and trade costs for export decisions. Although the presence of trade costs (i.e. sunk and variable costs) are essential to describe the different export choices firms with different level of productivity make, little is known about them. The previous literature has concentrated mainly...

This paper investigates the relationship between firm heterogeneity and a firm’s decision to export, using the annual survey of Thai manufacturing firms from 2001 to 2004. A significant contribution of this paper is that we are, for the first time, able to break down FDI by country of origin to observe whether the behavior of MNEs differs by region of origin. We find that entry sunk costs and f...

Productivity and Trade Orientation in UK Manufacturing Within a structural model we explicitly allow for the trade orientation of companies to estimate productivity dynamics within 4-digit UK manufacturing industries. We use the FAME data on UK companies over the period 1994-2003. Following Ackerberg et al. (2005) we adjust the algorithm in Olley and Pakes (1996) by augmenting investment and ex...

This study evaluates the potential impact of improved agricultural technologies on smallholders’ crop productivity and welfare. We use household-level data from Ethiopian Rural Household Survey collected by IFPRI in 1989-2009. The survey covers around 1500 rural households drawn from four regions and 15 rural villages. Endogenous treatment effect model is employed to account for the selection b...