Recent theoretical research shows that exporters are more productive than nonexporters. We show that this result holds almost trivially for the case of constant marginal cost of production, as mainly assumed in the literature, but it may not hold true if the marginal cost is not constant. Our...

By exploiting establishment-level data, this paper sheds new light on the sources of the changes in the structure of production, wages, and employment that have occurred over the last several decades. We investigate the following two related hypotheses. First, that most of the recent increase in...

How do economic policies and institutions affect job reallocation processes and their consequences for productivity growth? This paper studies the extreme case of economic system change and alternative transitional policies in the former Soviet Republics of Russia and Ukraine. Exploiting annual...

Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain company and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 firms in 34 countries. We find large cross-country differences in the...

We investigate the effect of pollution on worker productivity in the service sector by focusing on two call centers in China. Using precise measures of each worker's daily output linked to daily measures of pollution and meteorology, we find that higher levels of air pollution decrease worker...

This paper is one of the first to use employer-employee data on wages and labor productivity to measure discrimination against immigrants. We build on an identification strategy proposed by Bartolucci (2014) and address firm fixed effects and endogeneity issues through a diff GMM-IV estimator....

This paper investigates cross-country productivity convergence at a sectoral level using multivariate unit-root tests. Our empirical analysis counts with three distinctive features. First, it allows all the coefficients in the panel specification to vary across countries. Second, it accounts for...

Using data on the US and EU top R&D spenders from 2004 until 2012, this paper investigates the sources of the US/EU productivity gap. We find robust evidence that US firms have a higher capacity to translate R&D into productivity gains (especially in the high-tech industries), and this...