This paper examines the effect of Walmart's entry into Mexico on Mexican manufacturers of consumer goods. Guided by firm interviews that suggested substantial heterogeneity across firms in how they responded to Walmart's entry, we develop a dynamic industry model in which firms decide whether to...

Studies on innovation and international trade have traditionally focused on manufacturing because neither was seen as important for services. Moreover, the few existing studies on services focus only on industrial countries, although in many developing countries services are already the largest...

This paper shows how trade liberalization can have an asymmetric effect on heterogeneous firms. It develops a neo-Schumpeterian growth model predicting that the impact of liberalization on economic performance is positive “on average”, but more advanced firms benefit more. These predictions...

Studies on innovation and international trade have traditionally focused on manufacturing because neither was seen as important for services. Moreover, the few existing studies on services focus only on industrial countries, although in many developing countries services are already the largest...

Business dynamism and economic growth in Europe and Central Asia have weakened since the late 2000s, with productivity growth driven largely by resource reallocation between firms and sectors rather than innovation. To move up the value chain, countries need to facilitate technology adoption,...

We study how complementarities and intellectual property rights affect the management of knowledge workers. The main results relay when a firm will wish to sue workers that leave with innovative ideas, and the effects of complementary assets on wages and on worker initiative. We argue that firms...

The purpose of this paper is to link the propensity for innovative activity to cluster spatially to the stage of the industry life cycle. The theory of knowledge spillovers, based on the knowledge production function for innovative activity, suggests that geographic proximity matters most in...

We review the role of R&D in endogenous growth theory, and describe extant empirical research – macro and micro – bearing on R&D as an engine of growth. Taking R&D to be key, while recognizing the significance of economic incentives, emphasizes knowledge as an economic object and, more...