In this note we document how constraints in the business environment, as perceived by individual firms, differ both across countries and within each country, across firms. This finding is of key importance given recent theoretical models that suggest idiosyncratic distortions can have large...

We study the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on employment growth with random samples of manufacturing and services from France, Germany, Spain and the UK for 1998–2000, totaling about 20,000 companies. We develop and estimate a model relating firms' and...