This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on heterogeneous firms and trade, which emphasizes firm selection into international markets and reallocations of resources across firms. We discuss the empirical challenges that motivated this research and its relationship to traditional...

This paper provides a comprehensive picture of mental health services in England, including staffing and expenditure, and the number of people in need and the number treated. Historically, this information has been split across sub-sections of the health and social services; and the readily...

Using US firm level panel data we simultaneously assess the contributions to productivity of three potential sources of research and development spillovers: geographic, technological, and product market ("horizontal"). To do so, we construct new measures of geographic proximity based on the...

How does a major financial network innovation influence firm performance? Despite much speculation we have little hard quantitative evidence about the impact of technology diffusion in financial services. In this paper we use the entire adoption history for SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide...

We provide an analysis of the 2008-2009 trade collapse using microdata from a small open economy, Belgium. First, we find that changes in firm-country-product exports and imports occurred mostly at the intensive margin: the number of firms, the average number of destination and origin markets...

This paper exploits the surge in Chinese exports from 1994 to 2004 as a natural experiment to evaluate the effects of a unilateral low wage trade and competition shock to producers in Mexico. We find that this shock causes selection at both firm and product levels as its impact is highly...

The erosion of a number of national systems of employment relations, and the evidence from large scale workplace surveys has brought attention to the considerable diversity of employment systems within major economies. This essay applies the theory of evolutionary games to explain the diffusion...

In this paper we use insights from organizational economics and financial regulation to study the optimal architecture of supervision. We suggest that the new architecture should revolve around the following principles: (i) banking, securities and insurance supervision should be further...

Using longitudinal data from Ukraine we examine the extent of any long-lasting effects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl disaster on the health and labour market performance of the adult workforce. The variation in the local area level of radiation fallout from the Chernobyl accident is...

Economists and economic historians want to know how much better life is today than in the past. Fifty years ago economic historians found surprisingly small gains from 19th century US railroads, while more recently economists have found relatively large gains from electricity, computers and cell...