Higher productivity in importing German manufacturing firms: self-selection, learning from importing, or both?

This paper uses a newly available comprehensive panel data set for manufacturing enterprises from 2001 to 2005 to document the first empirical results on the relationship between imports and productivity for Germany, a leading actor on the world market for goods. Furthermore, for the first time the direction of causality in this relationship is investigated systematically by testing for self-selection of more productive firms into importing, and for productivity-enhancing effects of imports ('learning-by-importing'). We find a positive link between importing and productivity. From an empirical model with fixed enterprise effects that controls for firm size, industry, and unobservable firm heterogeneity we see that the premia for trading internationally are about the same in West and East Germany. Compared to firms that do not trade at all two-way traders do have the highest premia, followed by firms that only export, while firms that only import have the smallest estimated premia. We find evidence for a positive impact of productivity on importing, pointing to self-selection of more productive enterprises into imports, but no clear evidence for the effect of importing on productivity due to learning-by-importing

Size-Dependent Regulations, Firm Size Distribution, and Reallocation

In France, firms with 50 employees or more face substantially more regulation than firms with less than 50. As a result, the size distribution of firms is visibly distorted: there are many firms with exactly 49 employees. We model the regulation as the combination of a sunk cost that must be paid the first time the firm reaches 50 employees, and a payroll tax that is paid each period thereafter when the firm operates with more than 50 employees. We estimate the model using indirect inference by fitting the discontinuity of the size distribution. The key finding is that the regulation is equivalent to a combination of a sunk cost approximately equal to about one year of an average employee salary, and a small payroll tax of 0.04%. Our structural model fits well the discontinuity in the size distribution. Removing the regulation improves labor allocation across firms, leading in steady-state to an increase in output per worker slightly less than 0.3%, holding the number of firms fixed. However, if firm entry is elastic, the steady-state gains are an order of magnitude smaller

Integrating Expenditure and Income Data: What to Do with the Statistical Discrepancy?

The purpose of this paper is to build consistent, integrated datasets to investigate whether various disaggregated data can shed light on the possible sources of the statistical discrepancy. Our strategy is first to use disaggregated data to estimate consistent sets of input-output models that sum to either GDP or GDI and compare the two in order to see where the discrepancy resides. We find a few “problem” industries that appear to explain most of the statistical discrepancy. Second, we explore what combination of the expenditure data and the income data seem to produce the most sensible data according to a few economic criteria. A mixture of data that do not aggregate either to GDP or to GDI appears optimal

What's Driving the New Economy? The Benefits of Workplace Innovation

Using a unique nationally representative sample of U.S. establishments surveyed in both 1993 and 1996, we examine the relationship between workplace innovations and establishment productivity and wages. Using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data, we find evidence that high-performance workplace practices are associated with both higher productivity and higher wages. Specifically, we find a positive and significant relationship between the proportion of non-managers using computers and the productivity of establishments. We find that firms re-engineer their workplaces and incorporate` more high-performance practices experience higher productivity. For example, profit sharing is associated with increased productivity, and employee voice has a large positive effect on productivity when it is implemented in the context of unionized establishments. These workplace practices appear to explain a large part of the movement in multifactor productivity over the 1993-96 period. When we examine the determinants of wages within these establishments, we find that re-engineering a workplace to incorporate more high-performance practices leads to higher wages. However, increasing the usage of profit sharing results in lower regular pay for workers, especially technical workers and clerical/sales workers. Finally, increasing the percentage of workers meeting regularly in groups has a larger positive effect on wages in unionized establishments

Creative destruction over the business cycle: a stochastic frontier analysis

[[abstract]]This paper examines the within-industry distributions of jobs created and destructed across plants in terms of technical efficiency, technical efficiency change, scale effect, and technical change. It further investigates how these distributions vary with economic activity. By applying the stochastic frontier analysis to plant-level longitudinal data on Taiwan’s 23 two-digit manufacturing industries spanning the period 1992–2003, we find that jobs created (destructed) are disproportionately clustered at plants with lower technical efficiency but higher rate of technical change. A fall in economic activities is associated with a statistically significant decrease (increase) in the fraction of newly created (destructed) jobs accounted for by plants with a higher rate of technical change, indicating that creative destruction is more pronounced during economic contractions.[[journaltype]]國外[[incitationindex]]SSCI[[ispeerreviewed]]Y[[countrycodes]]US

Cross-Border Acquisitions and Corporate Taxes: Efficiency and Tax Revenues

We find that reduced foreign corporate taxes may lead to inefficient foreign acquisitions if complementarities between foreign and domestic assets are low, and to efficient foreign acquisitions if such complementarities are high. Moreover, with large complementarities, foreign acquisitions can increase domestic tax revenues. The reason is that in the bidding competition between the foreign firms, all benefits from the acquisition, including tax advantages and evaded taxes, are competed away and captured by the domestic seller which, in turn, pays capital gains tax on the proceeds. Technical issues in the tax code, such as the treatment of goodwill deductibility, is also shown to crucially affect the pattern of foreign acquisitions