We consider strategic government policies on the exports of final goods andon the input production when the inputs are non-tradable and produced by the foreignfirms. If the policies consist of only per-unit tax/subsidies either on the final goods oron the inputs, it is optimal for the...

We investigate the role of the transport sector in structuring the location of economic activitywithin two-region economic geography models of the footloose capital and core-peripherytypes. In our setting, competitive carriers offer transport services for shipping manufacturedgoods across...

I provide empirical evidence that badly governed firms respond more to aggregate shocks than do well governed firms.(...)

East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wagesspecified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wagegap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

Recent research has led to the empirical regularity that rm growth rate distributionsare heavy tailed. This nding implies that a few rms experience spectaculargrowth rates and decline, but that most rms have marginal growth rates. The literatureon high growth rms shows that high growth rms are...

The literature shows that for most UK industries privatization might be necessary but is not sufficient to produce economic benefits. Often prior changes in management or later changes in market structure and regulation have larger impacts than privatization itself. We ask what changes around...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on informality andunemployment in a general framework where formal and informal firms are subject to thesame externalities, differing only with respect to some parameter values. Both formal andinformal firms have monopoly...

The purpose of this paper is to sort out firm-related differences from effects that result from different economic structures. A non-parametric decomposition is used to analyse firm level difference between the wage spread in the two major regions of unified Germany. If firm-specific effects...