Governments at the bidding table.

Recently, several governments in Canada have shown an increased willingness to subsidize private investment projects, especially in the manufacturing sector, to the dismay of tax conservatives. I evaluate under what circumstances these government subsidies make sense, paying particular attention to the efforts of the Ontario and federal governments to attract new investments in the automobile sector. I show what governments should expect to pay when they join a bidding war and derive the expected welfare gain. The analysis suggests that, in contrast with the public debate and many previous studies, it is not the absolute size of benefits that matters, but the relative private attractiveness for the investing firm and the relative size of externalities in each location.

Wage and productivity premiums in Sub-Sharan Africa.

Using a matched employer-employee data set of manufacturing plants in three sub-Saharan countries, I compare the marginal productivity of different categories of workers with the wages they earn. A methodological contribution is to estimate the firm level production function jointly with the individual level wage equation using a feasible GLS estimator. The additional information of individual workers leads to more precise estimates, especially of the wage premiums, and to a more accurate test. The results indicate that equality holds strongly for the most developed country in the sample (Zimbabwe), but not at all for the least developed country (Tanzania). Moreover, the breakdown in correct remuneration in the two least developed countries follows a distinct pattern. On the one hand, wage premiums exceed productivity premiums for general human capital characteristics (experience and schooling). On the other hand, salaries hardly increase for more firm-specific human capital characteristics (tenure and training), even though these have a clear productivity effect.

Exporting raises productivity in Sub-Saharan African manufacturing plants.

Proponents of trade liberalization argue that it will force firms to produce closer to the production possibility frontier and that the frontier will move out faster. In particular, plants that export will achieve a higher productivity level. However intuitive the argument, empirical evidence is meager. This hypothesis is examined by calculating the effect of export status on productivity for a panel of manufacturing plants in nine African countries. The results indicate that exporters in these countries are more productive, replicating a similar finding for developed countries. More importantly, exporters increase their productivity advantage after entry into the export market. While the first finding can be explained by selection---only the most productive firms engage in exporting---the latter cannot. The results are robust when unobserved productivity differences and self-selection into the export market are controlled for using different econometric methods. Scale economies are shown to be an important channel for the productivity advance. Credit constraints and contract enforcement problems prevent plants that only produce for the domestic market to fully exploit scaleeconomies.

Cross-country conversion factors for sectoral productivity comparisons.

International comparisons of the level of labor or total factor productivity have used exchange rates or purchasing power parity (PPP) to make output and capital comparable across countries. Recent evidence suggests that aggregate PPP holds rather well in the long run, making it a good basis for comparison. At the same time, sectoral deviations from PPP are very persistent, raising the need for disaggregate price measures to make disaggregate productivity comparisons. Sectoral differences in the importance of nontradables make it even more important to work with sectoral prices when country-comparisons are made at the sectoral level. Mapping prices from household expenditure surveys into the industrial classification of sectors and adjusting for taxes and international trade, I obtain a sector-specific PPP measure. The few previous studies that used sectoral prices only had conversion factors available for a single year. With price data for 1985, 1990, 1993, and 1996, I am the first to test whether the constructed conversion factors adequately capture differential changes in relative prices between countries. For some industries--Agriculture, Mining, and less sophisticated manufacturing sectors--the indices prove adequate. For most other industries, aggregate PPP is a superior currency conversion factor.

Disaggregate productivity comparisons: sectoral convergence in OECD countries.

International comparisons of productivity have used exchange rates or purchasing power parity (PPP) to make output comparable across countries. While aggregate PPP holds well in the long run, sectoral deviations are very persistent. It raises the need for a currency conversion factor at the same level of aggregation as the output that is compared. Mapping prices from household expenditure surveys into the industrial classification of sectors and adjusting for taxes and international trade, I obtain an expenditure-based sector-specific PPP. Using detailed price data for 1985, 1990, 1993, and 1996, I test whether the sectoral PPPs adequately capture differential changes in relative prices between countries. For agriculture and the majority of industrial sectors, but not for most service sectors, sectoral PPP is preferred over aggregate PPP. Using the most appropriate conversion factor for each industry, productivity convergence is found to be taking place in all but a few industries for a group of 14 OECD countries. The results are robust to the base year used for the currency conversion.

Global sourcing of a complex good.

We analyze a firm that produces a final good from multiple intermediates that can each be sourced domestically or from a low-wage country. The model explicitly incorporates that sourcing decisions of intermediates are interdependent. Equilibrium predictions depend crucially on a key modeling assumption - the nature of the trade friction that foreign production has to overcome. If production abroad involves a fixed cost, offshoring one intermediate unambiguously facilitates offshoring of other intermediates. However, if production abroad involves incomplete contracts, offshoring one intermediate almost always makes it more difficult to offshore others. We illustrate that the pattern in prices at which successive automotive parts are imported into the U.S. accords better with the predictions of the incomplete contracting model, except for a few countries with the best governance indicators.

Understanding cross-country differences in export premia - Comparable evidence for 14 countries.

We use comparable micro level panel data for 14 countries and a set of identically specified empirical models to investigate the relationship between exports and productivity. Our overall results are in line with the big picture that is by now familiar from the literature: exporters are more productive than non-exporters when observed and unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for, and these exporter productivity premia tend to increase with the share of exports in total sales; there is evidence in favour of self-selection of more productive firms into export markets, but nearly no evidence in favour of the learning-by-exporting hypothesis. We document that the exporter premia differ considerably across countries in identically specified empirical models. In a meta-analysis of our results we find, consistent with theoretical predictions, that productivity premia are larger in countries with lower export participation rates, with more restrictive trade policies, lower per capita GDP, less effective government and worse regulatory quality, and in countries exporting to relatively more distant markets.

Outsourcing when investments are specific and complementary.

Using the universe of large Canadian manufacturing firms in 1988 and 1996, we investigate to what extent firms’ outsourcing decision can be explained by a simple property rights model. A novel aspect of the data is the availability of component level information on outputs as well as inputs which permits the construction of a very detailed measure of vertical integration. Moreover, we construct five different measures of technological intensity to proxy for investments that are likely to be specific to a buyer-seller relationship. Our main findings are that (i) greater specificity makes outsourcing less likely; (ii) complementarities between the investments of the buyer and the seller are also associated with less outsourcing; (iii) only when we focus on the range of transactions with low complementarities do we find support for several nuanced predictions of the property rights model.