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Kamil Galuščák
- 18 February 2014
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 1634Details
- Abstract
- Drawing from confidential firm-level balance sheets in 11 European countries, the paper presents a novel sectoral database of comparable productivity indicators built by members of the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) using a newly developed research infrastructure. Beyond aggregate information available from industry statistics of Eurostat or EU KLEMS, the paper provides information on the distribution of firms across several dimensions related to competitiveness, e.g. productivity and size. The database comprises so far 11 countries, with information for 58 sectors over the period 1995-2011. The paper documents the development of the new research infrastructure, describes the database, and shows some preliminary results. Among them, it shows that there is large heterogeneity in terms of firm productivity or size within narrowly defined industries in all countries. Productivity, and above all, size distribution are very skewed across countries, with a thick left-tail of low productive firms. Moreover, firms at both ends of the distribution show very different dynamics in terms of productivity and unit labour costs. Within-sector heterogeneity and productivity dispersion are positively correlated to aggregate productivity given the possibility of reallocating resources from less to more productive firms. To this extent, we show how allocative efficiency varies across countries, and more interestingly, over different periods of time. Finally, we apply the new database to illustrate the importance of productivity dispersion to explain aggregate trade results.
- JEL Code
- L11 : Industrial Organization→Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance→Production, Pricing, and Market Structure, Size Distribution of Firms
L25 : Industrial Organization→Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior→Firm Performance: Size, Diversification, and Scope
D24 : Microeconomics→Production and Organizations→Production, Cost, Capital, Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity, Capacity
O4 : Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth→Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity
O57 : Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth→Economywide Country Studies→Comparative Studies of Countries - Network
- Competitiveness Research Network
- 15 September 2010
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 1242Details
- Abstract
- Using the Albrecht et al. (2003) version of the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition technique along the wage distribution, we find that immigrant workers do not affect changes in the Czech wage structure between 2002 and 2006 despite their substantial inflows. Instead, changes in the wage structure are explained solely by increasing returns of native workers, while changes in the observed characteristics of native workers, particularly a rising level of education, are responsible for increasing wage dispersion. The sizeable inflows of foreign workers in the sample years are concentrated among young workers with primary and tertiary education and are primarily due to rising labour demand. The negative immigrant-native wage gaps are persistent along the wage distribution and are explained mainly by differences in observed characteristics. We provide evidence on increasing returns to education of native workers along the wage distribution. The returns are higher in 2006 than in 2002, in line with the evidence in the previous literature.
- JEL Code
- J31 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs→Wage Level and Structure, Wage Differentials
J21 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Demand and Supply of Labor→Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure - Network
- Wage dynamics network
- 23 February 2010
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 1153Details
- Abstract
- This paper uses information from a rich firm-level survey on wage and price-setting procedures, in around 15,000 firms in 15 European Union countries, to investigate the relative importance of internal versus external factors in the setting of wages of newly hired workers. The evidence suggests that external labour market conditions are less important than internal pay structures in determining hiring pay, with internal pay structures binding even more often when there is labour market slack. When explaining their choice firms allude to fairness considerations and the need to prevent a potential negative impact on effort. Despite the lower importance of external factors in all countries there is significant cross-country variation in this respect. Cross-country differences are found to depend on institutional factors (bargaining structures); countries in which collective agreements are more prevalent and collective agreement coverage is higher report to a greater extent internal pay structures as the main determinant of hiring pay. Within-country differences are found to depend on firm and workforce characteristics; there is a strong association between the use of external factors in hiring pay, on the one hand, and skills (positive) and tenure (negative) on the other.
- JEL Code
- J31 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs→Wage Level and Structure, Wage Differentials
J41 : Labor and Demographic Economics→Particular Labor Markets→Labor Contracts - Network
- Wage dynamics network