Policies to stimulate export growth and diversify the composition of exports in South Africa are now high on the government’s agenda. In order to understand exporting and its impact on job creation, one needs to understand how firms function, what determines, or constrains, exporting at the...

The Hicks or direct elasticity of substitution is traditionally derived from the production function. This paper exploits duality theory to present a more general derivation from the input distance function, which is exactly dual to the Shadow Elasticity of Substitution. The new elasticity is...

Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period....

Predicting the future is an imprecise science, and something that should always be carried out carefully and the results should be taken with a pinch of salt. That said it is sensible to assume that most of the drivers of commoditization are likely to remain in force for the foreseeable future....

Predicting the future is an imprecise science, and something that should always be carried out carefully and the results should be taken with a pinch of salt. That said it is sensible to assume that most of the drivers of commoditization are likely to remain in force for the foreseeable future....

We study organizational hierarchies in a transition country. Using employer-employee matched data for a set of Slovenian manufacturing firms, we find strong support for the key hypotheses of the knowledge-based hierarchies proposed by Garicano (2000) and Caliendo and Rossi-Hansberg (2012)....

Predicting the future is an imprecise science, and something that should always be carried out carefully and the results should be taken with a pinch of salt. That said it is sensible to assume that most of the drivers of commoditization are likely to remain in force for the foreseeable future....

This paper examines why organizations have adopted a wide range of responses when addressing the opportunities and threats posed by commoditization. Some may choose to focus on their cost base, whilst others may focus on innovation. Whatever strategy is adopted, it will be driven by a range of...

We investigate whether exposure to export markets improves plant productivity. Our estimation framework adds export experience as an additional state variable and a fixed cost of entry into export markets to Olley and Pakes’s (1996) behavioral model. We find robust evidence of a positive...