Institutions,entrepreneurship, and economic growth in Europe

Institutions have a decisive impact on the prevalence and nature of entrepreneurship. To date, the impact of institutions on (productive) entrepreneurship and the effects of entrepreneurship on economic growth have largely been investigated in isolation. In this paper, we bring together institutions, entrepreneurship, and economic growth using a parsimonious growth model in a 3SLS specification. In our first stage, we regress multiple measures of entrepreneurial activity on institutional proxies that are known to correlate with more productive forms of entrepreneurial activity. Using the fitted values of this first-stage regression as our proxy for productive entrepreneurship, we can then estimate a panel growth regression following Islam (1995) in a second stage. The third stage then optimizes the estimation of the two equations simultaneously. Our results show that productive entrepreneurship contributes to economic growth. In our set of proxies for institutional quality, financial stability, small government, and perceived start-up skills are the most important predictors of such productive entrepreneurship.     

Where Do Firms Export,How Much and Why?

The empirical finding that exporting firms are more productive on average than non‐exporters has provoked a large theoretical literature based on models such as Melitz ( 2003 ), where more productive firms are more likely to overcome costs associated with trade. This paper investigates how closely the productivity heterogeneity framework fits the data from a firm‐level survey that includes information on export destinations and firm characteristics such as productivity. We find a high degree of unpredictable idiosyncratic participation in export markets by firms and a relatively weak positive correlation between the extent of a firm's export market participation and its export sales. We find that a small number of standard gravity variables provide a close fit to the country‐level determinants of trade but that greater variation results in more difficulty in explaining firm‐specific factors driving exporting behaviour. We also illustrate some elements of the dynamics over time in firm exporting patterns by destination. We show that lagged exporting activity has a significant effect on a firm's current exporting profile.     

The skill premium and economic growth with costly investment,complementarities and international technological-knowledge diffusion

We analyse the skill premium and the growth rate in an innovator-imitator general equilibrium growth model assuming (i) internal costly investment in both physical capital and R&D, (ii) complementarities between intermediate goods in production and (iii) technological-knowledge diffusion. We find that in the imitator country these three elements influence the economic growth rate and the skill premium. In the innovator country, while the growth rate is affected by costly investment and complementarities, the skill premium is not affected by any of our assumptions. It depends solely on the productive advantage of high-skilled over low-skilled labour, which suggests that the sustained increase in the skill premium observed in several developed countries over the last three decades may have been due to increases in such productive advantage.     

Digital transformation,sustainability, and purpose in the multinational enterprise

We discuss how environmental and pandemic crises in combination with digitization are presenting the multinational enterprise (MNE) with increasing geopolitical, organizational, and market tensions. Institutional pluralism is creating a more complex global environment. The organization of productive work is shifting, which challenges how MNEs structure and coordinate their activities. Changing consumer and investor expectations are broadening the understanding of value creation with implications for business models. We contend that the tensions invite MNEs to reconsider how they frame, formalize, and realize corporate purpose. We close with a research agenda that recognizes the need for MNEs to become purpose-driven actors.     

Credit constraints, entrepreneurial talent, and economic development

In this paper, we formalize the view that economic development requires high rates of productive entrepreneurship, and this requires an efficient matching between entrepreneurial talent and production technologies. We first explore the role of financial development in promoting such efficient allocation of talent, which results in higher production, job creation, and social mobility. We then show how different levels of financial development may endogenously arise in a setting in which financial constraints depend on individual incentives to misbehave, these incentives depend on how many jobs are available, and this in turn depends on the level of financial development. Such complementarity between labor market and financial market development may generate highly divergent development paths even for countries with very similar initial conditions.     

Exporting and productivity in business services: Evidence from the United States

Does exporting make firms more productive, or do more productive firms choose to become exporters? This paper considers the link between exporting and productivity for a sample of firms in US business services. We find that larger, more productive firms are more likely to become exporters, but that these factors do not necessarily influence the extent of exporting. This conforms with previous literature that there is a self-selection effect into exporting. We then test for the effect of exporting on productivity levels after allowing for this selection effect. We model both the relationship between exporting and productivity, and a simultaneous relationship between export intensity and productivity after allowing for selection bias. In both cases we find an association, indicating that productivity is positively linked both to exporting and to increased exposure to international markets.     

Unionized Labour Market,Unemployment Allowances,Productive Public Expenditure And Endogenous Growth

An endogenous growth model with unionised labour market is developed to analyse the interaction between the tax financed productive public expenditure policy and the unemployment benefit policy. We consider both ‘Efficient Bargaining’ model and ‘Right to Manage’ model; and analyse properties of balanced growth rate maximising income tax policy as well as effects of unionisation. This growth rate maximising income tax rate exceeds the competitive output share of the public input in the presence of an unemployment benefit scheme. The growth effect of unionisation in the ‘Efficient Bargaining’ model and in the ‘Right to Manage’ model are different.     

Destructive entrepreneurship in the small business sector: bankruptcy fraud in Sweden, 1830–2010

Small Business Economics - Entrepreneurship will not always productive: Baumol (1990, 1993) distinguishes between productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurial activities, and in the...     

Firm exits as a determinant of new entry: Is there evidence of local creative destruction?

This study posits that a local process of creative destruction provides an impetus to regional industrial renewal. We argue that exits of older firms release resources that stimulate local entry. New entrants add value to these resources by redeploying them in more productive uses. We test our hypotheses with a unique longitudinal database encompassing the entry and exit of Canadian manufacturing enterprises. We find that exits of old firms increase entry and that on average new entrants are more productive. Persistent high local rates of exit, however, deter entry.     

Foreign outsourcing, exporting, and FDI: A productivity comparison at the firm level

This paper documents how productivity varies with globalization modes, based on a firm-level data set covering all manufacturing industries in Japan without any firm-size threshold. Only a small fraction of firms outsource, export, or invest abroad. Foreign outsourcers and exporters tend to be less productive than the firms active in FDI or in multiple globalization modes but more productive than domestic firms. This productivity ordering is robust even when firm size, factor intensity, and/or industry are controlled for. This paper also finds that outsourcers are on average less capital intensive than other globalized firms.     

Consumers under pandemic anxiety: Suppressors,intensifiers, and resilients

COVID-19 turned the lives of all people across the world upside down. Everyone faced the threat of catching the virus and denial of access to the physical marketplace. For many, it also brought the threat of partial or full unemployment. This trinity of upheaval produced heightened anxiety. The purpose of this article is to understand how consumers coped with anxiety during the pandemic and lockdown periods. We hypothesized that consumers coped with such anxiety by engaging in diverse creative and productive activities, which served as anxiety suppressors. In addition, we hypothesized that one's enduring mind positivity provided resilience and helped consumers mitigate their anxiety. In survey data from a random sample of 550 consumers in the United States, we found support for these hypotheses. Consumers who engaged in voluntary productive activities suffered less anxiety. And consumers with higher resilience levels also felt lower levels of anxiety. In addition, we found that enjoyment of shopping intensified the experience of COVID-19-induced anxiety. The research framework linking this specific set of antecedents to COVID-induced anxiety and its affirmation in this study are new to the literature and therefore offer a notable contribution to it. These findings show two pathways to marketers: Organize and promote voluntary productive activities and offer means for consumers to cultivate personal resilience, on for-profit and not-for-profit platforms. Also, we suggest a future consumer research agenda for when fate again brings us face-to-face with similar or even lesser catastrophes, which, according to scientific forecasters, it sadly but surely will.     

The Division of Labor,Investment and Capital

A dynamic general equilibrium model based on corner solutions is used to formalize the classical theory of investment and capital which considers investment to be a vehicle for developing a high level of division of labor in roundabout productive activities. If it takes time for a specialist producer of tractors to learn the right method to produce commercially viable tractors, specialization in producing tractors is infeasible in the absence of investment in terms of consumption goods which are consumed by the specialist producer of tractors before he can sell tractors. If specialized learning by doing can speed up accumulation of professional knowledge so that roundabout productive machines become cheap, such investment for increasing the level of division of labor in roundabout productive activities will speed up economic growth. Because of the trade-off between economies of specialized learning by doing and transaction costs, the model can be used to investigate the effects of a change in the transaction cost coefficient, which can be affected by policy, the legal system and urbanization, on the evolution of the division of labor, on real interest rates and on the saving rate.     

Labour market institutions,learning and self-employment

We develop a dynamic partial-equilibrium model to analyse how labour market institutions (wage compression, minimum wages, unemployment benefits, mobility costs and fixed-costs of self-employment) and learning affect who and when people become self-employed. We find that certain ability groups of workers become self-employed for both “carrot” and “stick” reasons: Some prefer self-employment to the low institutionalised wage, while others are not productive enough to qualify for a job at the institutionalised wage. Furthermore, wage compression and learning may give rise to a class of switchers who start in wage employment and later switch to self-employment. Several predictions of the model are consistent with observed empirical regularities, such as the existence of a group of low-skilled self-employed workers, the increasing propensity for self-employment over age groups and the larger spread in earnings among self-employed.     

Innovation Economy,Productive Public Expenditure and Economic Growth

Multidisciplinary innovation is the main engine of growth for an increasing number of economies. Innovation requires the participation of and interaction between all economic agents. It also requires public spending on education, research and infrastructures. Our main goal is to emphasize the government's role in a growing innovation economy. Developing a non‐scale, idea‐based, one‐sector growth model with complementarities and productive public expenditure, we analyse theoretically the growth effects of an increase in productive public expenditure, which we find positive in the short, medium and long run.     

Export Entry,Export Exit and Productivity in German Manufacturing Industries

This paper contributes to the flourishing literature on exports and productivity by using a unique newly available panel of exporting establishments from the manufacturing sector of Germany from 1995 to 2004 to test three hypotheses motivated by a theoretical model by Hopenhayn (Econometrica 1992): (H1) Firms that stop exporting in year t were in t?1 less productive than firms that continue to export in t. (H2) Firms that start to export in year t are less productive than firms that export both in year t?1 and in year t. (H3) Firms from a cohort of export starters that still export in the last year of the panel were more productive in the start year than firms from the same cohort that stopped exporting in between. While results for West Germany support all three hypotheses, this is only the case for (H1) and (H2) in East Germany.     

Export Premium,Self‐selection and Learning‐by‐Exporting: Evidence from Chinese Matched Firms

This study empirically focuses on examining the hypotheses of export premium (exporters are more productive than non‐exporters), selection‐into‐exporting (more productive firms are ones that tend to become exporters) and learning‐by‐exporting (new export market entrants have higher productivity growth than non‐exporters in the post‐entry period). The propensity score matching method is used to adjust for observable differences of firm characteristics between exporters and non‐exporters, allowing an adequate ‘like‐for‐like’ comparison. We also use the difference‐in‐difference matching estimator to capture the magnitude of different productivity growth between matched new export market entrants and non‐exporters in the post‐entry period up to two years. Drawing on 2,340 Chinese firms in the period 2000–02, we find evidence for export premium and self‐selection, and once the firm has entered the export market there is additional productivity growth from the learning effect, in particular in the second year after entry.     

Product market competition and access to credit

In this paper, we unveil a disregarded benefit of product market competition for firms. We introduce the probability of bankruptcy in a simple model where firms compete à la Cournot and apply for collateralized bank loans to undertake productive investments. We show that the number of competitors and the existence of outsiders willing to acquire the productive assets of distressed incumbents affect the equilibrium share of investment financed by bank credit. Using a sample of Italian manufacturing firms, mostly small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we found evidence showing that the degree of product market competition is positively correlated with the share of investment financed by bank credit only when outsiders are absent.     

Location decision of heterogeneous multinational firms

We examine how multinational firms with heterogeneous total factor productivity (TFP) self-select into different host countries. Both aggregate- and firm-level estimates suggest that more productive French firms are more likely than their less efficient competitors to invest in relatively tough host countries. Countries with a smaller market potential, higher fixed costs of investment or lower import tariffs tend to have higher cutoff productivities and attract a greater proportion of productive multinationals. This self-selection mechanism remains largely robust when we control for unobserved firm and country heterogeneity and address potential TFP endogeneity.     

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT,STRUCTURAL CHANGE AND NATURAL RESOURCE BOOMS: A STRUCTURALIST PERSPECTIVE

In this paper we present a structuralist two‐sector model on economic development, structural change and natural resource booms. We describe a multiple equilibria scenario, in which manufacturing development is the main source of economic progress. Natural resource booms, by modifying the productive structure of the economy, may set destabilizing forces. De‐industrialization processes may take place, confining developing countries in poverty traps. Public intervention in the economic sphere, both through short‐run macro policies and through long‐run development strategies, may help to free the economy from poverty traps and to foster the development process.     

Firm heterogeneity and location choice of Taiwanese multinationals

This paper examines the extent to which production location decisions of Taiwanese multinationals reflect underlying patterns of firm productivity. In our theoretical model, heterogeneous firms in a middle-income country decide on the optimal production locations for serving three geographically separate markets: domestic, foreign high-income and foreign low-income. The model shows that the equilibrium decision of a firm depends on the fixed investment costs of establishing foreign subsidiaries, production costs, transportation costs, market size and its own productivity level.Using firm-level data in 2000, Taiwanese electronics firms are divided into four different categories: non-FDI, investors in China only, investors in the U.S. only, investors in both China and the U.S. We use a multinomial logit model to link firms' location choices with their productivity, controlling for country, industry and other firm characteristics. Our empirical results are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model. We show that more productive firms engage in outward FDI, with the most productive ones investing in both China and the U.S. We also provide evidence indicating that Taiwanese multinationals investing only in the U.S. are more productive than those investing exclusively in China due to smaller fixed investment costs in China relative to the U.S.