Resource misallocation and aggregate productivity

Internationale inkomensverschillen worden grotendeels veroorzaakt door verschillen in productiviteit. In dit proefschrift wordt de potentiële bijdrage bestudeerd die misallocatie van productiefactoren kan leveren aan de verklaring van zulke verschillen in geaggregeerde productiviteit. Er wordt een analyse gedaan door recent verbeterde methodieken toe te passen op twee unieke datasets voor de (formele) industriële sector. De resultaten laten zien dat misallocatie van arbeid en kapitaal tussen heterogene bedrijven kan leiden tot een substantiële verlaging van de geaggregeerde productiviteit, hoewel dit effect niet merkbaar sterker lijkt te zijn in armere landen. Het onderzoek concentreert zich op een aantal institutionele factoren die misallocatie versterken, zoals ontslagbescherming, financiële ontwikkeling en politieke connecties. Strengere ontslagbescherming en een laag niveau van financiële ontwikkeling blijken verband te houden met een hogere mate van misallocatie. Potentieel verstorende politieke connecties bevorderen de toegang tot financiële middelen, al speelt dit een minder grote rol in landen met een goed functionerend financieel systeem. De resultaten van dit proefschrift tonen aan dat het oplossen van institutionele knelpunten kan leiden tot efficiëntere allocatie van productiefactoren, en zo kan bijdragen tot productiviteitsgroei

Employment Protection and Misallocation of Resources across Plants:International Evidence

Employment protection affects aggregate productivity via several channels in potentially contradicting ways, which makes it difficult to establish the relationship between the two. This study focuses on the misallocation of production factors across plants, which has been shown in past studies to substantially reduce aggregate productivity. The study provides new evidence on the effect of employment protection on resource misallocation using a large dataset of manufacturing plants covering more than 90 countries. For measuring misallocation, I use the within‐industry dispersion of the marginal product of labor and total factor productivity. The results show that higher cost of dismissing redundant workers is positively associated with misallocation. The effect of dismissal cost is especially larger in industries that have greater demand for adjusting labor. More specifically, the effect is larger in industries that intrinsically have higher layoff rate, and in industries that have large positive or negative sales growth rates

The export performance of emerging economy firms: the influence of firm capabilities and institutional environments

We advance a two-stage theoretical model which contends that the export performance of emerging economy firms (EEFs) will depend both upon their firm-specific capabilities and their home institutional environments. Specifically, we argue that EEFs will be more likely to export when facing more uncertainty at home from greater political instability, substantial informal competition, and high corruption. Furthermore, we hypothesize that firms’ export intensities will be contingent upon specialized internal capabilities such as a skilled workforce, top managerial experience, and access to external technologies. We test these hypotheses using a dataset of more than 16,000 firms from the four BRIC economies (i.e., Brazil, Russia, China and India). Our results confirm that political instability and informal competition have robust effects on the export propensity of EEFs, whilst export intensity is contingent upon the availability of skilled workers and access to external technologies via licensing

Social Value Creation in Institutional Voids: A Business Model Perspective

The literature on Base of the Pyramid (BoP) strategies emphasizes that creating social value requires collaborative, multi-stakeholder business approaches. However, there is limited understanding of how businesses can successfully coordinate such value creation processes in the developing economies that face significant institutional voids. This study adopts a business model perspective for analyzing social value creation processes that span organizational boundaries. We introduce a novel, theoretically grounded business model framework that helps conceptualize social value by locating the various loci of value creation, and the stakeholders that partake in creating and capturing this value. We subsequently analyze the mechanisms of social value creation in M-Pesa, a renowned boundaryspanning mobile money system that has advanced financial inclusion among tens of millions of u