This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of new product versus process innovations on export propensity at the firm level. Product innovation is a key factor for successful market entry in models of creative destruction and Schumpeterian growth. Process innovation helps securing...

Most existing empirical evidence on the impact of profit taxation on multinational firm activity is based on cross-country data. One major drawback of such data is that countries differ not only with regard to taxes but along other dimensions which might be hard to capture by means of observable...

The European Union (EU) provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states to allow them to catch up with the EU average. Under the Objective 1 scheme, NUTS2 regions with a GDP per capita level below 75% of the EU average qualify for structural funds transfers from the central EU budget....

We develop a heterogeneous-firms model with trade in goods, labor mobility and credit constraints due to moral hazard. Mitigating financial frictions reduces the incentive of high-skilled workers to migrate to one region such that an unequal distribution of industrial activity becomes less...

I show in this paper that incomplete contracts affect a firm’s decision about serving foreign customers through exports or local sales from an affiliated plant. When contracts between two agents within a firm are too costly to write, the share of multinational firms may be higher or lower...

We extent a solvable version of the core-periphery agglomeration model to four countries located in two regions. The paper shows that there might still be a race to the bottom in capital income tax rates despite agglomeration rents earned by the mobile factor. We find that intra-regional tax...

In contrast to what several papers have argued recently, we show that firm heterogeneity fosters agglomeration of economic activity. If firms are more similar with respect to their total factor productivity, each company faces a lower propensity to export. This renders the home market more...

We examine the impacts of both domestic and international financial market development on R&D intensities in 22 manufacturing industries in 18 OECD countries for the period 1990-2003. We take account of such industry characteristics as the need for external financing and the amount of tangible...

We build a heterogeneous-firms model with firm-specific wages and credit frictions to study the role of financial development for inequality in the global economy. If there are many small firms, better access to external funds reduces wage inequality and unemployment. In contrast, if there are...

We use a quantitative model to study the implications of European integration for welfare and migration flows across 1,318 regions. The model suggests that an increase of trade barriers to the level of 1957 reduces welfare by about 1-2 percent on average, depending on the presumed trade...