This paper combines a literature identifying the sources of productivity growth with a literature exploring differences between the characteristics of exporters and non-exporters to examine the contributions of exporters and non-exporters to aggregate labour productivity growth in the Irish...

Recent economic literature suggests the importance of sunk costs and hysteresis in explaining export patterns in international trade. To explore their empirical importance, we present a new conceptual framework that distinguishes six different types of exporter behaviour, and apply this...

The aim of this paper is to explore how a recent methodology developed to look at export dynamics in a region in a large economy can be extended to look at export dynamics in a small open economy, where local market size means that enterprises tend to engage in exporting at an early stage in...

This paper analyses the spatial concentration and sectoral specialisation of local enterprises (LEs) and multinational enterprises (MNEs) in Ireland. Entropy indices are used as indicators of spatial and sectoral clustering in Irish manufacturing. Correlation coefficients are calculated to...

Recent research has sought to explore whether exporting enterprises have superior performance characteristics relative to non-exporters, and whether such superiority is associated with performance pre- and/or post- exporting. This paper extends existing research by examining the influence of...

Should economies that promote themselves as export platforms for FDI be expected to experience relatively high levels of export spillovers from foreign to host-country enterprises? To investigate how export decisions of host-country enterprises are associated with the presence and export...

This paper analyses the development and the determinants of backward linkages between electronics firms and domestic sub-suppliers in Ireland using data for 1982 to 1995. We find that, even when controlling for other firm and sector specific factors, foreign firms have lower linkages than Irish...

Is Research and Development activity an important determinant of the probability that a plant will survive? We model the survival of a cohort of Indigenous plants over the period 1986 to 1996 as a function of sectoral and firm characteristics. We use a firm-level dataset provided by Forfás, the...

This paper analyses the sectoral distribution of US investment across EU member countries. We attempt to determine whether investment is sectorally concentrated by country and whether there seems to be any evidence of increased sectoral specialisation in US investment as the EU market has become...