This paper examines the effects of IT-related spillovers on firm-level productivity improvements over a long-term horizon. In contrast, prior research has largely focused on the direct and contemporaneous impacts of IT investments. As a result, we do not fully understand how IT investments are associated with ongoing productivity improvements in future periods and how spillovers influence these...

As firms increasingly rely on crowdsourced digital goods, understanding their impact on productivity becomes critical. This study measures the firm-level productivity impact of one such good, non-pecuniary (free) open source software (OSS). The results show a previously unmeasured positive and significant return to the usage of non-pecuniary OSS that is not solely due to cost savings. Inverse p...

Small firms are often seen to be the engines of growth. There are two main sources of empirical evidence that are adduced to support this conclusion. The first is that job creation has been coming mainly from small firms. The second is that the share of employment accounted for by small firms has increased in the past two decades. Both of these sources rely on a simple metric--employment. This ...

It is well known that the performance of foreign firms compared to domestic companies is superior with respect to employment, wages, and productivity. In this paper we detail the export behaviour of foreign affiliates in the United Kingdom relative to indigenous firms. Our findings show that foreign firms are more likely to export, and when they do so they are more export intensive and overall ...

The removal of high levels of protection combined with substantial real devaluations has changed the environment in which Ghanaian manufacturing firms have operated in the 1990s. The changes in output, composition and productivity, which have occurred over this period, are examined in this paper. Survey evidence for the growth of the sector is shown to be consistent with data from sales tax ret...

Exporters and multinationals are larger and more productive than their domestic counterparts. In addition to productivity, financial constraints and labor market constraints might constitute barriers to entry into foreign markets. We present new empirical evidence on the extensive and intensive margin of exports and FDI based on detailed micro-level data of German firms. Our paper has three mai...

Abstract In the past few years, diversification has turned into a highly controversial issue amongst numerous managers in almost each and every business. It is contended by many that diversification is vitally important and highly effective especially when it comes to evaluating the financial performance. There are several studies about the relationship between diversification and financial per...

Using contemporary data for an extensive sample of 1020 Indian firms, this paper investigates the impacts that size and age of firms have on firm-level productivity and profitability. In India older firms are found to be more productive and less profitable, whereas the larger firms are, conversely, found to be more profitable and less productive. These performance differences are explained as a...

We examine how industrial clustering affects biotechnology firms’ innovativeness, contrasting similar firms not located in clusters or located in clusters that are or are not focused on the firm’s technological specialization. Using detailed firm level data, we find clustered firms are eight times more innovative than geographically remote firms, with largest effects for firms located in cluste...

Productivity and Size of the Export Market: Evidence for West and East German Plants, 2004 Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality data at the plant level, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between productivity and size of the export market for Germany, a leading actor on the world market for manufactured goods. It documents t...