We analyse a very rich and unique panel database which provides information on exports at the firm-product level. A stylised fact in the data is that many firms add as well as drop products from the export mix in any given year. Motivated by recent theory we investigate what determines the...

Many governments offer significant inducements to attract inward investment, motivated by the expectation of spillover benefits. This paper begins by reviewing possible sources of spillovers. It then provides a comprehensive evaluation of the empirical evidence on productivity, wages and exports...

Conventional methods for analysing worker flows often focus on gross flows or transition probabilities. This is not necessarily informative for identifying the scale of labour ‘adjustment’ in an economy in the sense of the expansion and decline of industries. We develop a method that relates...

A large share of world trade, especially among the OECD countries, is two-way trade within industries, so-called intra-industry trade (IIT). Despite this, few attempts have been made to examine why countries export some products within industries, whereas they import others. We examine this...

According to the ‘convergence hypothesis’, multinational companies will tend to displace national firms and trade as total market size increases and as countries converge in relative size, factor endowments, and production costs. Using a recent model developed by Markusen and Venables (1998)...

While foreign-owned firms have consistently been found to pay higher wages than domestic firms to what appear to be equally productive workers, the causes of this remain unresolved. In a two-period bargaining framework we show that if training is more productive and specific in foreign firms,...

Our paper investigates the link between international outsourcing and wages utilizing a large household panel and combining it with industry level information on industries' outsourcing activities from input-output tables. This approach avoids problems such as aggregation bias, potential...

Using firm-level data for the UK, we investigate the link between firms’ financial health, borrowing ratio and export exit, paying special attention to the recent financial crisis. Our results show that deterioration in the financial position of firms has increased the hazard of export exit...

Using information on more than 1000 firms in a number of emerging countries, we find quantitative evidence that suppliers of multinationals that are pressured by their customers to reduce production costs or develop new products have higher productivity growth than other firms, including other...

It is striking that by far the lion's share of empirical studies on the impact of outsourcing on firms considers industrialized countries. However, outsourcing by firms from emerging economies is far from negligible and growing. This paper investigates the link between outsourcing and innovation...