This paper uses a panel of small and medium manufacturing firms in Australia and studies the relationship between productivity and outsourcing accounting for the possibility of inefficient firms self-selecting into exit instead of outsourcing to domestic suppliers. Estimating a propensity model...

This research sheds light on the role of multinational production on the type of innovation performed by firms. We construct matched firm-patent data to measure the scope of innovation, that is the extent to which the output of R&D can be spread across different product lines. We focus on two...

It is stylized that productivity and input size should relate positively and monotonically in the long run. In this paper, I present a theory that unifies the role of demand and production to investigate conditions that make this relation a bell-shape. Under the optimality assumption and when...

A model of monopolistic competition is presented in which the relation between the productivity and input size of producers is non-monotonic and bell-shaped. The model predicts that markets matter and the average size of the producers is directly scaled by the size of the market. An indirect...

The quasi-linear fuzzy modelling of Filev (1991) is used to estimate the relationship between the number of managers and employees in a firm. The results form the basis for the classification of firms into small and large businesses. Application to a data of Australian firms shows an evolution...

This paper studies the role of efficiency in a firm’s decision to contract out. Emphasis is on the heterogeneous nature of firms and when firms are only considering outsourcing to domestic suppliers. Firm-level data on Australian manufacturing reveal an ordering of efficiency between firms...

This paper sheds new light on the forces shaping outsourcing decision by considering a certain form of non-linearity in overhead costs which effectively discretizes a firm’s size into small and large regimes. Extending Grossman & Helpman (2002) in this line shows that firms unable to fully...

Using a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms, where production requires both low and high skills and workers are immobile across sectors and skills, it is found that the endogenous shifts in aggregate productivity and the reallocation of workers among the mix of integrated and...

A general framework for the study of outsourcing is introduced that incorporates dynamics and heterogeneity among both upstream and downstream producers to mimic an exit approach (Hirschman, 1970) to building vertical relations. The environment is one of search friction and incomplete contracts,...

This paper sheds new light on forces shaping the outsourcing decision by linking the decision to a certain form of non-linearity in overhead costs which divides a firm’s operation into small and large regimes. Marginal firms that find evolution into a large business too costly outsource in a...