The present paper analyses whether and how the affiliation of a firm to a business group affects its productivity. Based on novel data consisting of official firm data from the German Business Register including ownership information from Bureau van Dijk’s MARKUS database and from the...

This paper claims that distance alone is a poor proxy for international transport costs in gravity equations. We develop a theoretical framework with a manufacturing and a transport sector, where the level of manufacturing exports determines the demand for transport. Above a certain threshold,...