This paper investigates whether or not the natural selection mechanism (NSM) of economic Darwinism works in severe recessions. Although standard firm models imply the importance of NSM in an economy by showing firm's rational behavior on entry, surviv-ing, and exit leads to macro-level TFP...

Productivity convergence among countries has been investigated extensively with mixed results. This paper extends the analysis to the firm level to shed light on the debate of convergence or non-convergence. We find productivity convergence among firms widely in Japan, in both manufacturing...

This paper presents a model of firm-level productivity growth that distinguishes between innovation and technology diffusion, and then applies the model to a large-scale data set of Japanese manufacturing and non-manufacturing firms between 1994 and 2000. We find both innovation and diffusion...

This article presents a new simple econometric framework for the estimation of individual firms' markup over their marginal cost, taking account of firm heterogeneity, demand-driven cyclical price changes, and the limited availability of firm-level information. The framework is applied to study...

This article presents a new simple econometric framework for the estimation of individual firms' markup over their marginal cost, taking account of firm heterogeneity, demand-driven cyclical price changes, and the limited availability of firm-level information. The framework is applied to study...