Global and U.S. trade declined dramatically in the wake of the global financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009. The subsequent recovery in trade, while vigorous at first, gradually lost momentum in 2010. Against this backdrop, this paper explores the prospects for global and U.S. trade in...

This paper aims to derive a methodology to decompose aggregate revenue TFP changes over time into four different components – namely physical TFP, mark-ups, quality and production scale. The new methodology is applied to a panel of EU countries and manufacturing industries over the period...

Financial institutions are key to allocate capital to its most productive uses. In order to examine the relationship between productivity and bank credit in the context of different financial market set-ups, we introduce a model of overlapping generations of entrepreneurs under complete and...

The paper aims at investigating to what extent wage negotiation set-ups have shaped up firms' response to the Great Recession, taking a firm-level cross-country perspective. We contribute to the literature by building a new micro-distributed database which merges data related to wage bargaining...

"Productivity is an essential concept in almost every field related to Economics and Management. As Paul Krugman wrote in \The Age of Diminishing Expectations (1994)" \Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country's ability to improve its standard of...

We provide an overview of productivity development and other related indicators in Asia and Pacific (APAC) countries, with comparisons with the Europe region. We use the seventh vintage firm-level data from the Productivity Research Network in the APAC region and CompNet in Europe for our study....

World trade contracted sharply in late 2008 and early 2009 following the deepening of the financial crisis in September 2008. This paper discusses the main mechanisms behind the global downturn in trade and its impact on euro area exports and competitiveness. It finds that the euro area was hit...

Against the background of increasing competition and other significant structural changes implied by globalisation, maintaining and enhancing competitiveness has evolved into one of the prime concerns in most countries. Following up on previous work (see in particular ECB Occasional Papers No....

This paper analyzes the performance of global value chains during the trade collapse. To do so, it exploits a unique transaction-level dataset on French firms containing information on cross-border monthly transactions matched with data on worldwide intra-firm linkages as defined by property...