We develop a simple and tractable model of productivity growth and technology spillovers that can explain the emergence of real world empirical productivity distributions. We assume that the outcomes of firms’ in-house R&D efforts are governed by a stochastic growth process that depends on the current technology level of the firm. Moreover, firms can imitate other firms’ technologies subject to...

Foreign Direct Investment, Black Economic Empowerment and Labour Productivity in South Africa The impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestically owned firms in developing countries has been widely debated in the literature. It has been argued that FDI provides access to advanced technologies and other intangible assets which may spill over to the host country and allow domestic firms...

We employ the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data collected from 2006-2011 for over 40,000 firms in 115 countries to study the effect of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification on firm performance measured by sales growth and labor productivity. Our results from both the univariate tests and multivariate regressions show that ISO-certified firms exhibit higher sa...

This paper examines the effects of integration into global value chain on innovation and productivity with a firm-level panel dataset from China. Our results show that firms focusing on international collaboration in technology have a higher patenting activity than those focusing on national collaboration in technology. The innovation-enhancing effect of international collaboration in technolog...

The development of information and communication technologies has led to the rise of new working forms in firms, some of which are temporally and spatially dispersed, such as telework practices. However, ‘telework’ is a broad concept, including different forms of remote work as well as diverse reasons and performance implications for the separation of work from ...

This paper discusses pricing strategies and production of upstream and downstream firms from the view of a principal-agent relationship. As an agent, the upstream firm offers intermediate products and allocates them between downstream firms according to their incentives. As principals, downstream firms determine the quantities of final products they separately supply based on the competition or...

As a result of debt enforcement problems, many high-productivity firms in emerging economies are unable to pledge enough future profits to their creditors and this constrains the financing they can raise. Many have argued that, by relaxing these credit constraints, reforms that strengthen enforcement institutions would increase capital flows to emerging economies. This argument is based on a pa...

We analyze the relationship between Antidumping (AD) Protection and the productivity of EU domestic firms in import-competing industries. For this purpose we identify a panel of domestic firms between 1993 and 2003 that at some point during this period are affected by AD initiations. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that AD measures result in improvements of measured productiv...