We review Baumol's typology of productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship. We argue that the typology is relevant for explaining the secular decline in business dynamics. To the existing explanations for this decline, we put forward the thesis that entrepreneurship has become less...

Structural change is an important driver of productivity growth at the aggregate level. While previous productivity decompositions account for the contributions of market entry and exit, they overlook continuing firms that switch from one industry to another. We develop an improved productivity...

In this paper, we shed new light on the productivity impact of breakthrough patents, as well as their role in the variability of productivity across countries. We use text analysis and machine learning-based estimates of the number of breakthrough patents and show that there was a significant...

The past few decades have witnessed a slowdown in productivity growth in many advanced economies, including Finland. Against this backdrop, this study investigates product switching in Finnish manufacturing firms during the period of 2009-2019. The findings indicate a growing trend towards...

The productivity growth has an important linkage with economic growth and standard of living. It not only increases output but also improves the efficiency level of firms/industries through better utilization of factors of production, and therefore public policies aim at improving productivity....

Most industrialized countries today are facing historical demographic changes, paring increasing retirement with a declining labor force. We study the consequences of an increasing pensioner-worker ratio in a macroeconomic framework, which suggests a negative effect on total factor productivity....

I document externalities in the agricultural sector of India due to air pollution. Using variation in pollution induced by changes in wind, I show that higher levels of particulate matter lead to decreased agricultural productivity, with changes in productivity of 10 percent being common....

How costly is the misallocation of production that we might expect to result from distortions such as market power, incomplete contracts, taxes, regulations, or corruption? This paper develops new tools for the study of misallocation that place minimal assumptions on firms’ underlying...

Italy's economic stagnation is a matter of fiscal, national, and European concern. Since a good remedy requires an accurate diagnosis, this paper summarises, compares, and evaluates the main explanations for this stagnation. After describing Italy's recent economic record, the paper reviews...

This paper investigates the free cash flow productivity of SOEs compared with non-SOEs and examines its possible determinants. We find that SOEs have slightly weak free cash flow productivity but significantly stronger than non-SOEs. Similar performance exists among commercial class I and II...

Social ties, as informal institutions, contribute to firms' performance in emerging economies. Formal market-supporting institutions in emerging economies are in general less developed, social ties cultivated by entrepreneurs thus serve as substitutes for formal institutional support. However,...

Ignoring strategic interactions among final goods producers, the extant theoretical literature shows that lower costs of imported inputs increase the exports of the final goods using those inputs. Hence, it does not explain the empirically relevant positive relationship between the costs of...

We analyze the evolution of the plant size distribution, static allocative efficiency, and business dynamism of the Korean manufacturing sector during its growth miracle (1967–2000) and the subsequent slowdown since 2000. The average plant size has an inverse-U pattern over time, uncorrelated...

This study investigates the impact of the land rental market (LRM) on labor productivity in rural China. Particular attention is given to farm and non-farm labor productivity. Using 2012 household-level data and a multinomial endogenous switching treatment regression (MESTR) technique, we find...

Two well established stylized facts of economic development are a strong correlation between investment and income, and large differences in investment rates across countries. Construction is the largest component of investment. This paper examines the implications of heterogeneity in...

Faced with more favourable demand conditions, many firms raise wages. However, we show that firms with labour market power, lower productivity, and binding wage floors will absorb these positive revenue productivity shocks as excess profits instead of increasing wages or employment. Our...

The focus of this study is to assess the causal impact of the connection of a local area to a high-speed rail network (HSR) on firms' total factor productivity (TFP). The quasi-random location of the HSR station in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia is exploited in a Difference-in Differences...

Measuring individual productivity (or equivalently distributing the overall productivity) in a network structure of workers displaying peer effects has been a subject of ongoing interest in many areas ranging from academia to industry. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on...