Agglomeration spill-over benefits are a major driver of policy creating industrial and science parks across the world. However, agglomeration benefits can be offset by competition arising out of the spatial proximity of firms. In this paper we examine the impact of agglomeration and selection on Taiwanese firms' total factor productivity (TFP) distribution and show that agglomeration causes the...

With the recent slowdown in global economic growth, there has been considerable focus in Ireland on some high-profile job losses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. This paper places such developments into a broader context and shows that aggregate changes in the net number of jobs arise from large numbers of firms both increasing and decreasing employment simultaneously at all points in...

Using a comprehensive dataset on the incidence of price-fixing across British manufacturing industries in the 1950s, I compare collusive and competitive industries and find evidence of a negative relationship between collusion and the labour productivity of larger firms relative to smaller firms. In particular, collusion is associated with a reduction or even a reversal of the productivity gap ...

We highlight the difference between the service sector and the manufacturing sector in regard to the determinants for a firm to start FDI and the productivity growth it achieves. This paper analyzes two questions: (1) whether a certain level of productivity explains a Japanese firm’s choice to be a multinational firm (by starting FDI), and (2) how the productivity of such a multinational firm c...

Since the late 1990s, labor productivity (total output per hour worked) growth has slowed markedly for many of the world’s largest economies. Using a micro-level dataset of firms in OECD member countries, OECD researchers Dan Andrews, Chiara Criscuolo, and Peter Gal decompose the slowdown and show that the top (“frontier”) firms have continued seeing productivity increases while the others (the...

Prior literature on foreign direct investment (FDI) spillovers has mainly focused on how the presence of FDI affects the productivity of domestic firms. In this study, we advance the literature by examining the effect of the diversity of FDI country origins on the productivity of domestic firms. We propose that the diversity of FDI country origins can facilitate FDI spillovers to domestic firms...

This paper examines the impact of business environment on the productivity of retail firms in Cameroon, which represent more than 50% of all firms. Using data from the 2009 Enterprise Surveys an overview of retail activities allows to identify the main factors characterizing the environment in which firms operate, i.e. access to credit, regulatory burden, illicit trade, administrative delays, i...

This study uses a unique firm-level dataset to examine how falling trade costs from 1993-2001 affected entry, exit, productivity, and exporting in the Korean manufacturing sector. We verify many of the predictions of recent heterogeneous-firm models of international trade. For example, falling trade costs reduced entry by new Korean firms, increased their probability of exit, and reduced the ma...

There is strong evidence that exporting firms are better. This correlation can potentially arise from many alternative casual models. In this paper, we utilise the natural experiments offered by transitioning into export in a dataset of Indian firms from 1990 to 2011, where each firm which made the transition is matched against one which did not. While exporting firms become bigger, there is no...

This paper examines the impact of floods on firms’ capital accumulation, employment growth and productivity by using a difference-indifference approach and considering firms’ asset structure. We find evidence that after a flooding companies in flooded regions show on average higher growth of total assets and employment than firms in areas not affected by flooding. The positive effect prevails f...