Mirroring the railroad industry of the 1940’s and 1950’s, the trucking industry today appearsto be achieving impressive productivity gains. But it is easy to confuse true productivityadvances in transportation industries with changes in ton-miles per unit of input that are duesimply to changes...

Die Gaspreise haben sich in Deutschland infolge des Lieferstopps russischen Erdgases deutlich erhöht, mit möglichen Folgen für die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit der deutschen Industrie. Wir berechnen den Gasverbrauch auf Produktebene für die Zeit vor der Energiekrise mit Hilfe der Mikrodaten der...

Using data from the Community Innovation Survey for Belgium in two consecutive periods, this paper explores the relationship between firm-level innovation activities and the propensity to start exporting. To measure innovation, we include indicators of both innovative effort (R&D activities) as...

Our paper adds empirical evidence on the causal effects of exporting on firms' performances. Using a rich database on Italian manufacturing firms, we test the self-selection and the post-entry effects hypotheses with respect to various firms' characteristics. Our analysis supports the idea that...

This paper explores how firms' skills and organizational change affect the returns from investments in ICT. Our work contributes to the literature by testing the hypothesis of complementarity in a panel of 540 Italian manufacturing firms during 1995-2000. By drawing on different statistical...

In the paper, productivity convergence is analyzed with a broad panel of industry sector data for the United States and Germany for 1960-1990. The time-series/cross-sectoral data set allows to investigate country-specific convergence, and to control for sector-specific differences in human...

This paper examines empirically some of the reasons why Japanese manufacturing firms frequently fail to satisfy concavity conditions of the cost function. We focus on the 'bubble period' in the 1980s when land was in great demand for reasons related to both production and speculation, and land...

Based on a panel data set of Japanese manufacturing firms in research-intensive industries, we investigate quantitatively the extent to which debt outstandings in the 90s affected the firm's R&D activities. We find that massive debt outstandings had significantly negative effect on R&D...

This paper studies the relationship between export activities and firm-level productivity. Unique matching of German and Austrian micro data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that exporters are more productive by around 40 percent compared with non-exporters. Moreover, beside other analysis techniques,...