This paper paints the first empirical portrait of services firms in the developing world. Compared with manufacturers, service providers are smaller, but growing faster. They are more productive, pay higher wages, and invest more heavily than manufacturers, but are less likely to export or to...

Empirical research has called for intensive use of disaggregated data. One of the most heavily used data set in studying the corporate behavior and performance in China is Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database. As we will show, this data set suffers from data matching problems as well as...

We study how French exporters react to a VAT shock in a destination country. As VAT shocks are by nature almost permanent, exogenous, and without impact on marginal costs, the subsequent price reaction makes it possible to identify a pure demand-led mark-up adjustment. The results of an analysis...

In this paper, we analyze how the offshoring of services by Swedish firms is affected by corruption in target economies. The results suggest that firms avoid corrupt countries and that corruption reduces the amount of offshored services. In addition, the sensitivity to corruption is highest for...

Using data from the Amadeus firm-level database, this paper explores the impact of banking sector concentration on corporate debt in the manufacturing sectors in eight Central, Eastern and Southeastern European (CESEE) countries in the precrisis period 2002–2007. Our findings indicate that...

Using a large panel of Czech manufacturing firms with 50 or more employees, we update the firmlevel labour demand elasticity estimates for 2002–2009. The economic crisis of 2008–2009 provides a source of variation needed for getting estimates that cover not only times of growth, but also a...

This paper investigates currency mismatch in the Hungarian corporate sector. Using a novel dataset on non-financial firms we first identify firms with mismatch, measure their weight in the economy and show their main characteristics. We then analyze the performance of firms during the crisis. We...