Economic theory predicts that outsourcing public services to private firms will reduce costs, but the effect on quality is ambiguous. We explore quality differences between publicly and privately owned ambulances in a setting where patients are as good as randomly assigned to ambulances of...

Recent dynamic models of firm entry and exit emphasise the relationship between a firm's productivity and the decision to enter or exit. If firm turnover is driven by productivity differentials then the reallocation of resources across firms at the micro level can have important implications for...

Consisting of teams working with firm level data, the International Study Group on Exports and Productivity has used comparable micro level panel data for 14 countries and a set of identically specified empirical models to investigate the relationship between exports and productivity. The...

The manufacturing sector in Taiwan has a market structure composed of large numbers of small firms, a heavy 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...

There is extensive empirical evidence pointing to the exsistence of sunk costs to exporting. Only higher productivity firms can profitably cover these and enter export markets. This is the standard explanation for the regularity with which econometric analyses reports that exporters are more...

This paper investigates various aspects of the links between exporting and productivity for a large sample of firms in the United Kingdom. We find evidence to support the preposition that sunk costs are important. Self selection takes place, with larger and more productive firms entering export...