innovative and unchanged products is developed and estimated using comparable firm-level data from France, Germany, Spain and the …

In this article, we estimate the costs of hiring, separation, and retirement of employees for a representative sample … costs are generally asymmetric (hiring is cheaper than terminations), increasing, and concave functions of the number of … entries or exits (either retirements or terminations). There is a fixed component to each of these costs that is related to …

attributed to a single dimension of underlying firm heterogeneity, efficiency. Conditional on entry, underlying efficiency … accounts for a much smaller variation in sales in any given market. Parameter estimates imply that fixed costs eat up a little …