This paper examines two potential channels of knowledge acquisition that underlie firm productivity growth in the Taiwanese electronics industry: participation in the export market and investments in Ramp;D and/or worker training. We focus on the argument that a firm's own investments in Ramp;D...

Industry cost and demand conditions can vary across countries leading to differences in industry market structure, including the distribution of output and productivity across firms and the magnitude of entry and exit flows. It has been argued that despite many outward similarities, two of the...

A positive correlation between productivity and export market participation has been well documented in producer micro data. Recent empirical studies and theoretical analyses have emphasized that this may reflect the producer's other investment activities, particularly investments in Ramp;D or...

While there is widespread empirical evidence indicating exporting producers have higher productivity than nonexporters, the mechanisms that generate this pattern are less clear. One view is that exporters acquire knowledge of new production methods, inputs, and product designs from their...

The manufacturing sector in Taiwan has a market structure composed of large numbers of small firms, a focus on less capital-intensive industries, and a dense network of firms specializing in subcontracting and trading services. It has been argued that these features lower the start-up costs of...

We develop a new model of quality to capture the idea that even if a customer chooses to purchase a product, it may fail to deliver.' In this event, the customer may wish to choose some other product. We model this as a two stage game where firms first choose quality and then price. We find that...

Why are higher quality niches seen as intrinsically more profitable in business circles? Why do high quality products sometimes have a low real price, while it is unusual to see low quality products with high real prices? Can markets have quality differentiation as well as quality bunching? In...

In this article we study differences in the returns to R&D investment between firms that sell in international markets and firms that only sell in the domestic market. We use German firm-level data from the high-tech manufacturing sector to estimate a dynamic structural model of a firm's...

Market structure is determined by the entry and exit decisions of individual producers. These decisions are driven by expectations of future profits which, in turn, depend on the nature of competition within the market. In this paper we estimate a dynamic, structural model of entry and exit in...

This paper estimates a dynamic structural model of discrete R&D investment and quantifies its cost and long-run benefit for German manufacturing firms. The dynamic model incorporates linkages between the firm's R&D choice, product and process innovations, and future productivity and profits. The...