Micro data have provided invaluable contributions to a better understanding of
the drivers of, and factors affecting, wages, productivity and productivity growth.
The literature in this area has highlighted both ownership and innovative activity
as two factors that consistently seem to affect productivity and its dynamics at the
micro level and the empirical regularity that larger firms pay higher wages. This
thesis provides evidence on these issues. In the first chapter I investigate the implications
of ownership concentration and the presence of financial institutions for
productivity, using both accounting data and detailed data on shareholdings for a
panel of quoted UK companies. I control for unobserved firm fixed effects and the
endogeneity of inputs and ownership using GMM estimation. The second chapter
considers whether nationality of ownership affects productivity. The analysis
challenges previous evidence of a foreign ownership advantage in the UK by showing
that the foreign advantage is by and large a multinational advantage, except
for US firms. In addition, longitudinal analysis disentangles the sources of the US
and MNE productivity advantage. The third chapter examines the hypothesis that
multinational firms have accessto larger knowledges tocks and quantifies how much
multinationals' innovative successis due to higher innovation expenditure and how
much to access to their intra-firm worldwide pool of information. The fourth chapter
matches information on innovative activity with production data to investigate
the link between innovation expenditure, knowledge flows and productivity growth.
The results confirm the importance of knowledge flows for innovation and of innovation
for productivity growth. The final chapter of the thesis investigates the
empirical regularity that larger establishments pay higher wages. The longitudinal
estimates demonstrate that positive effects of firm size on wages persist after controlling
for observed and unobserved worker, firm and match specific characteristics
and correcting for non-random mobility of workers