This Bruegel blueprint analyses, within the framework of the EFIGE (European Firms in a Global Economy) project, the export and foreign investment performance of European firms. It is based on new cross-country data from 15,000 individual firms never available before. Written by Giorgio Barba...

Competitiveness is one of the most debated issues in policy circles. But, what triggers it? Capitalising on the first existing harmonised cross-country dataset measuring the entire range of international activities of firms in seven European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy,...

We leverage on important fi ndings in social psychology to build a behavioral theory of protest vote. An individual develops a feeling of resentment if she loses income over time while richer people do not, or if she does not gain as others do, i.e. when her relative deprivation increases. In...

We extend a framework of monopolistically competitive firms heterogeneous in productivity and with endogenous markups (as in Melitz and Ottaviano, 2008) to incorporate the presence of financial frictions. Before producing, firms need to obtain a loan necessary to cover part of production costs,...

We incorporate heterogeneous financial frictions in a setting of monopolistically competitive firms with endogenous markups. Before producing, firms must pledge collateral to obtain a bank loan, needed to cover part of production costs. Firms differ both in productivity and in their cost of...

We revisit the relationship between trade and growth taking into account the recent expansion of global value chains (GVCs). We develop a new instrument for trade based on gravity estimations. Our instrument exploits a recent transportation shock: the sharp increase in the maximum size of...

We take the global financial crisis (GFC), as an example of major crises, to study the trends of intangible investment, the link between industrial performance and intangible assets, and the differences of financing of intangible versus tangible assets during crises. We find an upward trend in...