The "big-bang" liberalization of the inefficient Russian economy in 1992 provides a fruitful setting for analyzing the impact of several dimensions of market competition and other factors on enterprise efficiency. We analyze 1992-1998 panel data on 14,961 enterprises covering 75 percent of industrial employment, emphasizing the varied sources, geographic scope, intensity, time path, and surviva...

Agriculture is the focus of much contention in free trade negotiations. The Japanese government is against liberalizing the rice trade on the grounds that it would threaten “national food security” in the events of such shocks as crop failure, war, and embargo. Trade liberalization is expected to make Japan more dependent upon food imports and to make the Japanese economy more susceptible to th...

ABSTRACT An expected outcome of economic reforms in India is enhanced pace of industrialization with manufacturing sector playing a crucial role by increasing its share in output via higher investments and increased productivity. This process of industrialization was also expected to usher in possibilities for the slow growing states to catch up with the fast growing ones. This paper assesses t...

Adoption of new technology requires diversion of human and physical resources from direct production activities to learning/adjusting activities, which could reduce productivity temporarily. Focusing on the existence of such “learning cost”, we derive a simple model on the optimal timing for technology upgrading. This model suggests that, other things being equal, a firm perceived to have bette...

In this paper we utilize optimal contracts in a Lazear-Rosen tournament to experimentally examine how the selection of an incentive mechanism by managers and, likewise, the self-selection into a mechanism by employees, a§ect employee output. Depending on the treatment, those assigned the role of a principal or an agent could choose between two theoretically equivalent tournaments: a reward tour...

This paper studies the interaction between barriers to firm entry and distortions allocative efficiency in a standard model of dynamics. We derive strategy infer based on cross-country differences size distribution idiosyncratic distortions. The inferred resemble regulation-based indicators advanced economies but are substantially higher middle- low-income countries. Regulation-based cannot acc...

in recent decades, foreign direct investment (fdi) has played a vital role in economic growth of developed and developing countries. fdi brings new capital and technology to the host country beside a possibility of spillover to local firms. hence, fdi is considered as an important channel of technology transfer. however, in empirical studies, the size and direction of effects of fdi on producti...

Applying the Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (2001) decomposition to plant-level manufacturing data from Chile Korea, we find that entry exit of plants account for a larger fraction aggregate productivity growth during periods fast GDP growth. To analyze this relationship, develop model firm based on Hopenhayn (1992). When introduce reforms reduce costs or barriers technology adoption into cali...

Age and Gender Composition of the Workforce, Productivity and Profits: Evidence from a New Type of Data for German Enterprises This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm’s workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germ...

The recent micro economic literature concerning exports has highlighted the importance of firms characteristics and trade costs for export decisions. Although the presence of trade costs (i.e. sunk and variable costs) are essential to describe the different export choices firms with different level of productivity make, little is known about them. The previous literature has concentrated mainly...