This paper examines the role of changing factor endowments in the growth and decline of industries and regions. The implications of an endowment-based Heckscher-Ohlin trade model for plant entry and exit are tested on 20 years of data for the entire US manufacturing sector. The trade model...

Traditional measures of spatial industry concentration are restricted to given areal units. They do not make allowance for the fact that concentration may be differently pronounced at various geographical levels. Methods of spatial point pattern analysis allow to measure industry concentration...

Using the model recently developed by Jaumandreu (2003) this paper reports new results on the relationship between innovation and employment growth in Germany. The model is tailor-made for analysing firm-level employment effects of innovations using specific information provided by CIS data. It...

In order to simplify the representation of a technological relationship between inputs and outputs, a production unit's technology must typically satisfy some restrictive conditions, some of them being well known in the literature. This paper presents new results for aggregating labour inputs...

Production capital and technology, fundamental to understanding output and productivity growth, are unobserved except at disaggregated levels and must be estimated prior to being used in empirical analysis. We develop and apply a new estimation method, based on advances in economics, statistics,...

This study is concerned with the development of a theoretical model and its empirical application to the estimation of the interaction between firms and trade union in determining wages and employment. The focus is on analyzing the effects of unions? demands on the firm?s choice of factors of...

During the last decades, traditional manufacturing firms in Western economies have undergone a rapid transformation. Two effects of the globalised economy prompting firms to outsource labour intensive production to low wage areas are the increased market size and the competition. Innovation is a...

Does competitive pressure foster innovation? Technical progress consists of numerous small improvements made upon the existing technology continuous improvement and innovative activities aiming at entirely new technology (discrete innovation). Continuous improvement is often of limited relevance...

The paper intends to study the relationship between firm size and growth, effects of entry-deterrent-strategies (EDS) on firms’ size distribution (FSD) and determining factors of inequality of firm sizes. One approach is the ‘Law of Proportionate Effect’ (LPE) hypothesis by Gibrat (1931),...

This paper investigates the determinants of vertical integration. We first derive a number of predictions regarding the relationship between technology intensity and vertical integration from a simple incomplete contracts model. Then, we investigate these predictions using plant-level data for...