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...

We examine the importance of asset pricing anomalies for the real economy. When firms interpret public information in the way it is reflected in market prices, informational inefficiencies manifesting in financial markets as anomalies can cause material real inefficiencies. We estimate the joint dynamic distribution of firm characteristics that have been linked to anomalies and other firm varia...

Technical Change and Total Factor Productivity Growth: The Case of Chinese Provinces In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect technical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely external non-economic) as well as other exogenous (e...

Consider a stochastic frontier model with one-sided inefficiency u, and suppose that the scale of u depends on some variables (firm characteristics) z. A “one-step” model specifies both the stochastic frontier and the way in which u depends on z, and can be estimated in a single step, for example by maximum likelihood. This is in contrast to a “two-step” procedure, where the first step is to es...

In this paper we compare sources of economic growth in Japan and the United States from 1973 through 2000, focusing on the role of information technology (IT). We have adjusted Japanese data to conform to U.S. definitions in order to provide a rigorous comparison between the two economies. The contribution of information technology to economic growth was strikingly similar in Japan and the Unit...

This paper studies the relationship between export activities and firm-level productivity. Unique matching of German and Austrian micro data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that exporters are more productive by around 40 percent compared with non-exporters. Moreover, beside other analysis techniques, instrumental variable estimations suggest that exporting causes a rise in firm-level productivity. T...

Using historical, ®rm-level data, this study compares the productivity of Japanese and U.S. integrated steel producers. In recent decades Japanese producers have demonstrated higher labor productivity than their U.S. counterparts, due largely to higher investment. Calculations of multifactor productivity suggest that the American ®rms, nevertheless, maintain a small advantage in overall ef®cien...

Underground coal mining is a dangerous industry where the regulatory state may impose tradeoffs between productivity and safety. We recover the marginal tradeoffs using disasters near a mine as shocks that increase future accident costs. We find that in the second year after a disaster, productivity decreases 11% and accident rates decrease 18-80% for mines in the same state, with some evidence...