This paper provides evidence from a natural experiment on the importance of workers' tacit knowledge about firms' intangible assets for competition in product and labor markets. Evidence is presented on product and labor market imperfections across manufacturing and services firms in the...

This paper examines how productivity effects of human capital and innovation vary at different points of the conditional productivity distribution. Our analysis draws upon two large unbalanced panels of 6,634 enterprises in Germany and 14,586 enterprises in the Netherlands over the period...

This paper combines different strands of the productivity literature to investigate the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. On the one hand, a growing body of empirical research has been relating cross-country differences in key economic outcomes, such...

Using a country-industry panel dataset (EUKLEMS) we uncover a robust empirical regularity, namely that high-risk innovative sectors are relatively smaller in countries with strict employment protection legislation (EPL). To understand the mechanism, we develop a two-sector matching model where...

In this paper we provide an analysis of the process of creative destruction across 24 countries and 2-digit industries over the past decade. We rely on a newly assembled dataset that draws from different micro data sources (business registers, census, or representative enterprise surveys). The...

This paper studies cross-sectional heterogeneity in price-cost margins and the extent of rent sharing among 48 sectors and 10738 (mainly manufacturing) firms in France. At the sectoral level, the average price-cost mark-up and the average extent of rent sharing amount to 1.701 and 0.368...

This paper tests the pro-competitive effect of trade in the product and labor markets of UK manufacturing sectors between 1988 and 2003 using a two-stage estimation procedure. In the first stage, we use data on 9820 firms from twenty manufacturing sectors to simultaneously estimate mark-up and...

Consistent with two models of imperfect competition in the labor market, the efficient bargaining model and the monopsony model, we provide two extensions of a microeconomic version of Hall's framework for estimating price-cost margins. We show that both product and labor market imperfections...

We introduce collective bargaining in a static framework where the firm and its risk-neutral employees negotiate over wages in a non-binding contract setting. Our main result is the equivalence between the non-binding collective equilibrium wage-employment contract and the equilibrium contract...

This paper provides an economic foundation for non-binding mediation to stimulate first collective bargaining agreements, as implemented in British Columbia since 1993. We show that the outcome of first-contract mediation is Pareto efficient and proves immune to the insider-outsider problem of...