Governments often promote inward foreign investment to encourage technology “spillovers” from foreign to domestic firms. Using panel data on Venezuelan plants, we find that foreign equity participation is positively correlated with plant productivity (the “own-plant” effect), but this relationship is only robust for small enterprises. We then test for spillovers from joint ventures to plants wi...

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...

Systems developers and researchers have long been interested in the factors that affect software development productivity. Identification of factors as either aiding or hindering productivity enables management to take steps to encourage the positive influences and to eliminate the negative ones. This research has explored the possibility of developing an estimable model of software development...

Productivity the efficiency with which firms transform inputs into outputs is an essential concept in nearly every sub-field of economics. My goal in this lecture is to highlight some recent applied microeconomics research in this area. Most of this literature has focused on private firms, but you should think of “firms” broadly – including e.g. schools and hospitals. A broad “fact” that has mo...

organizations, in both public and private sectors, are designed to meet different goals and objectives. undoubtedly, productivity is one of the most significant objectives toward which administrators should plan and set goals. because an unproductive organization is unable to function properly and survive in the long term. reviewing literature on productivity concept reveals that there are diff...

In this paper we analyze the levels of technical efficiency and productivity growth attained by Spanish insurance companies during a period of deregulation. We compute Malmquist productivity indexes using the estimates of parametric distance function for several specialized insurance branches. In this way, we show that branch specialization matters a great deal and that firms combining two or t...

Community development efforts associated with the reduction in poverty and injustice historically have not benefited from the productivity and efficiency as well as private industry and government. Recently, declining entry barriers and Web ubiquity has spurred IS use for community development. This mini-track is designed to explore those uses and to encourage additional thoughts and models for...