Credit has been found to be a catalyst for economic growth, as it spurs investment, enhances productivity, allows costs to be spread out over time, improves resource allocation, and enables investors to cope better with macroeconomic volatility. Most studies focus on the relationship between financial development and growth at the country level, while few analyze the relationship at the firm le...

This paper is a first attempt of looking into the impact of IT and enterprise reform on productivity of Chinese manufacturing firms by using large scale firm level datasets from 1995 to 2002. It is found that enterprise reforms captured by entry and exit of firms have a positive impact on aggregated productivity growth. In addition, IT plays relatively more important role in productivity perfor...

This article examines learning-by-doing that is specific not just to individual firms but to pairs of firms working together in a contracting relationship. Using data from the oil and gas industry, I find that the productivity of an oil production company and its drilling contractor increases with their joint experience. This learning is relationship-specific: drilling rigs cannot fully appropr...

We examine the relationship between investments in information technology (IT) and two measures of retail firm performance: labor productivity and productivity growth over the 1992 to 1997 period. We use untapped firm and establishme nt micro data from the Censuses of Retail Trade and the Assets and Expenditures Survey. We show that large firms account for most retail IT investment, employment ...

Labour productivity distribution (dispersion) is studied both theoretically and empirically. Superstatistics is presented as a natural theoretical framework for productivity. The demand index κ is proposed within this framework as a new business index. Japanese productivity data covering small-to-medium to large firms from 1996 to 2006 is analyzed and the power-law for both firms and workers is...

We discuss superstatistics theory of labour productivity. Productivity distribution across workers, firms and industrial sectors are studied empirically and found to obey powerdistributions, in sharp contrast to the equilibrium theories of mainstream economics. The Pareto index is found to decrease with the level of aggregation, i.e., from workers to firms and to industrial sectors. In order to...

In this paper we extend the work of Färe and Zelenyuk (2003) to find a theoretically justified method of aggregating Malmquist Productivity Indexes over individual decision making units (firms, countries, etc.) into a group Malmquist Productivity Index. We also consider the aggregation of decomposed parts of the Malmquist Productivity Index to obtain a decomposition of the Malmquist Productivit...

Exports of labour-intensive manufactures from sub-Saharan Africa are negligible with the exception of Mauritius. Such exports from Ghana are low relative to other sub-Saharan African countries and relative to what would be predicted by its factor endowment. Firm level data from the two countries is used to assess the reasons for this poor performance. Large firms (those with more than 100 emplo...

This paper investigates various aspects of the links between exporting and productivity for a large sample of firms in the United Kingdom. We find evidence to support the proposition that sunk costs are important. Self selection takes place, with larger and more productive firms entering export markets, and firms have to become more productive in order to enter. Industry characteristics also af...

This paper develops a theory which investigates how firms’ choice of corporate organization is affecting firm performance and the nature of competition in international markets. We develop a model in which firms’ organisational choices determine heterogeneity across firms in size and productivity in the same industry. We then incorporate these organisational choices in a Krugman cumMelitz and O...