We study a search model where workers can send multiple applications to high and low productivity firms. Firms that compete for the same candidate can increase their wage offers as often as they like. We show that there is a unique equilibrium where workers mix between sending both applications to the high and both to the low productivity sector. Efficiency requires however that they apply to b...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of subsidies to attract multinational corporations when firms are heterogeneous in their productivity levels. I show that the use of a small subsidy raises welfare in the FDI host country, with the consumption gains from attracting more multinationals exceeding the direct cost of funding the subsidy program through a tax on labor income. This welfare gain...

Accurate measurement of returns to education is particularly important in African countries where government resources are extremely limited, and education's competition for budget dollars is intense. This paper attempts to measure consistently the returns to education in Ghana. The chief problem to be handled in the measurement of returns to education in Mincerbased wage regressions is ability...

This paper exploits public announcements of corruption allegations amongst Nigerian political figures to estimate the impact of political connections on firm value. Specifically, I draw results from market reactions to 27 events to determine whether politically connected firms suffer more from financial malpractice amongst government officials. This paper finds heterogeneous impacts of corrupti...

The trend of forming alliances to develop new products continues; however, many of these new product alliances fail. As such we explore how key risk types intrinsic in new product alliances, performance, relational, and knowledge appropriation risks, influence alliance success. Further, we theorize that different alliance governance mechanisms can reduce the negative impact of risks on alliance...

The Exporter Productivity Premium along the Productivity Distribution: First Evidence from a Quantile Regression Approach for Fixed Effects Panel Data Models An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents that exporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. This positive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large ...

This thesis is a collection of three essays in international trade. Chapter 1 explains how firm heterogeneity and market structure can distort the geography of international trade. By considering only the intensive margin of trade, Krugman (1980) predicts that a higher elasticity of substitution between goods magnifies the impact of trade barriers on trade flows. In this chapter, I introduce fi...

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences present a challenge to standard trade models and shows how recent “heterogeneous-firm” models of int...

In large firms, management resolves a trade off between hiring more versus better workers. The span of control or size is therefore intimately intertwined with the sorting pattern. Span of control is at the center of many studies in macroeconomics, comparisons of factor productivity, trade, and labor. With heterogeneous workers, we analyze the worker assignment, firm size, and wages. The patter...

This paper considers a model of district formation that incorporates a notion of regional industrial systems. Each firm chooses its location from the set of existing industrial districts. The heterogeneous firms are distinguished by its “stand alone” district-dependent production and transportation cost. However, if other firms locate in the same district, the firm’s stand alone cost is reduced...