This paper quantifies the contribution of technology gaps to international income inequality. I develop an endogenous growth model where cross-country differences in R&D efficiency and cross-industry innovation adoption opportunities together determine equilibrium gaps, trade patterns, Countries with higher are richer have comparative advantage more innovation-dependent industries. calibrat...

When firms collude and charge supracompetitive prices, consumers can bring antitrust lawsuits against the firms. litigation cost is low, accept as just another of doing business, whereas when high, lower price to deter litigation. Class action modeled a mechanism that allows plaintiffs attorneys obtain economies scale. We show class actions, firms’ incentive block them, may or not be socially d...

Firm-level, revenue-based productivity measures are ubiquitous in studies of firm dynamics and aggregate outcomes. One common measure is increasingly interpreted as reflecting “distortions” since distortions’ absence, equalization marginal revenue products should yield no dispersion this measure. Another but distinct the residual firm-level function, which reflects “fundamentals.” Using micro-l...

This paper studies the relationship between three measures of relative earnings and firm performance based on data of 664 listed manufacturing companies in China over the period 2005-2012. It finds that (1) capital earnings relative to labor earnings and the overall average wage level relative to a firm’s average wage level had negative effects on firm performance; (2) the earnings of high-leve...

Three dimensions of the performance of firms in Ghana’s manufacturing sector are investigated in this paper: their technology and the importance of technical and allocative efficiency. We show that the diversity of factor choices in not due to a non-homothetic technology. Observable skills are not quantitatively important as determinants of productivity. Technical inefficiency is not lower in f...

This paper measures the productivity impact of shop-floor employee involvement. On the basis of a representative German establishment data set, the study finds that the introduction of team-work and autonomous work groups, and a reduction of hierarchies in 1996/97 significantly increased average establishment productivity in 1997 – 2000. The estimation strategy controls for unobserved invariant...

This paper investigates the relationship between telecommunications infrastructure competition, investment and productivity. Using econometric modelling and input-output economics, the analysis examines and measures the extent to which telecommunications has contributed to national and sectoral productivity performance. The main findings from this paper suggests that most industries have benefi...

In parametric stochastic frontier models, the composed error is specified as the sum of a two-sided noise component and a one-sided inefficiency component, which is usually assumed to be half-normal, implying that the error distribution is skewed in one direction. In practice, however, estimation residuals may display skewness in the wrong direction. Model respecification or pulling a new sampl...

Some multi-sector endogenous growth models make strong predictions about productivity differences across sectors in the form of a distribution or density function. In this paper it is demonstrated that this distribution is left-skewed for a wide range of plausible parameter values. This stands in strong contrast to the right-skewed shape of the respective empirical distribution estimated by ker...

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...