This paper contributes to the flourishing literature on exports and productivity by using a unique newly available panel of exporting establishments from the manufacturing sector of Germany from 1995 to 2004 to test three hypotheses derived from a theoretical model by Hopenhayn (Econometrica 1992): (H1) Firms that stop exporting in year t were in t-1 less productive than firms that continue to ...

In this paper different formulae for the decomposition of aggregate productivity levels and changes are applied to a sample of German manufacturing firms that pertain to 11 different industries at a roughly two-digit level observed over the period 1981-1998. Productivity is measured by a nonparametric frontier function approach. The decompositions of productivity allow for an explanation of the...

In this paper, we use detailed trade and transactions data for the U.S. manufacturing sector to empirically analyze the direction and magnitude of the association between firm-level exposure to trade and the volatility of employment growth. We find that, relative to purely domestic firms, firms that only export and firms that both export and import are less volatile, whereas firms that only imp...

We analyse, from a worldwide view, the evolution of real Gross Domestic Product, Population and Gdp per inhabitant and the main differences in the levels of development are explained having into account the results of several cross-country models. The main conclusions highlight the necessity of new international policies for improving the educative level of population in less developed countrie...

Aid, Growth, and Jobs Various development objectives are worthy, but to my mind, one objective dominates all others: reducing the scourge of absolute economic misery in the world. In this paper, I focus on an important but relatively underemphasized approach to poverty reduction: helping the poor earn more in the labour market for the work they do, so that they can buy the goods and services th...

This paper analyses the impact of economic growth on the incidence of chronic child malnutrition using data on spells of change. Growth is found to have a significant but small effect on chronic child malnutrition except in Sub-Saharan Africa, where it does not seem to have any impact. The estimates imply that outside of Africa, a doubling of income will reduce the incidence of chronic child ma...

We present single-channel approaches to robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) in reverberant environments based on non-intrusive estimation of the clarity index (C50). Our best performing method includes the estimated value of C50 in the ASR feature vector and also uses C50 to select the most suitable ASR acoustic model according to the reverberation level. We evaluate our method on the REV...