Using panel data for nearly all service providers in a single industry sector, we examine productivity responses to changes in competition in the United States. The sector offers workplace employee representation through trade union branches which compete with one another for union members whose...

We build a model of firm entry and exit and show how returns to scale shape firm survival, the equilibrium productivity and size distributions and firm concentration. High productivity dispersion and high concentration ratios need not reflect inefficiencies when returns to scale are strongly...

Because heterogenous and unknown shareholder utility functions make it difficult to define a corporate objective common to all shareholders based on utility, the traditional theory of the firm concentrates on wealth maximization as the main measure of performance. Using the concept of ranked...

Regulations of product markets serve legitimate objectives but, when ill-designed, can impose unnecessary restrictions on competition, and therefore on business dynamism, productivity and ultimately well-being. A recent update of the OECD’s Product Market Regulation indicator for Costa Rica...

Recent literature tried to explain the Indian growth miracle in different ways, ranging from trade liberalization to industrial reforms. Using data on Indian manufacturing firms, this paper analyzes the relationship between firm's productivity and export market participation during 1991-2004....

Output and input market distortions manifest as wedges in the firm's first order conditions. The production approach to markup estimation recovers the markup wedge using the output elasticity for a variable and undistorted input. We show that using the revenue elasticity for any variable input,...

This chapter overviews productivity research from an industrial organization perspective. We focus on what is known and what still needs to be learned about the productivity levels and dynamics of individual producers, but also how these interact through markets and industries to influence...

Since the early 1990s international - or even global - outsourcing of intermediate products from suppliers has been propagated as a key means to improve the performance of firms. It is argued that becoming more lean and internationally focused is beneficial for the buyer as well as for the...

The objective of this article is to present research devoted to the relationships between HR practices and productivity (understood as behavior and results) of employees in the KIBS sector (knowledge intensive business services sector). The operations of companies in this sector are based on the...

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities onfirms’ performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontiertechnique is applied, basing the analysis on a unique unbalanced longitudinal datasetconsisting of 532 top...