We investigate to what extent worker heterogeneity explains the well-known wage and productivity exporter premiums, employing a matched employer-employee data set for Norwegian manufacturing. The ...wage premium falls by roughly 50% after controlling for observed and unobserved worker characteristics, while the total factor productivity premium falls by 25% to 40%, suggesting that sorting explains up to half of these premiums. Recent trade models emphasize the role of within-industry reallocation of labor in response to various shocks to the economy. Our findings suggest that aggregate productivity gains due to reallocation may be overstated if not controlling for sorting between firms and workers.
In this paper, we study the extent to which wage differentials between men and women can be explained by differences in productivity, disparities in friction patterns, segregation, and wage ...discrimination. For this purpose, we propose an equilibrium search model that features rent-splitting, on-the-job search, and two-sided heterogeneity in productivity. The model is estimated using German matched employer-employee data. Overall, the results reveal that female workers are less productive and more mobile than males. In addition, female workers have on average slightly lower bargaining power than their male counterparts.
This paper examines firm heterogeneity in terms of size, wages, capital intensity, and productivity between domestic and foreign-owned firms that engage in intra-firm trade, firms that export and ...import, firms that import only, and firms that export only. As previously documented, heterogeneity between different groups of trading firms is substantial. Taking into account intra-firm trade in addition to exporting and importing yields new insights into the productivity advantage previously established for exporting firms. The results presented here show that this premium accrues only to exporters that also import and to exporters that also engage in intra-firm trade, but not to firms that export only. Using simultaneous quantile regressions, the paper illustrates that heterogeneity within different groups of trading firm is equally large. Some of this within-group heterogeneity can be attributed to differences in trading partners. Ce texte examine l'hétérogénéité en termes de taille, salaires, intensité capitalistique, et de productivité (propriété domestique vs propriété étrangère) des firmes qui font du commerce intra-firme, qui importent et exportent, qui importent seulement, et qui exportent seulement. Comme on l'a montré antérieurement, l'hétérogénéité entre ces groupes de firmes commerçantes est substantielle. Prendre en compte le commerce intra-firme en plus de l'exportation et de l'importation jette une lumière nouvelle sur l'avantage de productivité qui a déjà été établie pour les firmes exportatrices : les résultats présentés dans ce texte montrent que cette prime de productivité n'existe que pour les exportateurs qui importent aussi et pour les exportateurs qui aussi font du commerce intra-firme, mais non pas pour les firmes qui exportent seulement. A l'aide de régressions simultanées par quantiles, le texte montre que l'hétérogénéité à l'intérieur des différents groupes de firmes commerçantes est également grande. Une portion de cette hétérogénéité intra-groupe peut être attribuable à des différences dans les partenaires commerciaux.
We examine whether the relation between earnings and bonuses changes after Sarbanes–Oxley. Theory predicts that, as the financial reporting system reduces the discretion allowed managers, firms will ...put more weight on earnings in compensation contracts to encourage effort. However, the increased risk imposed by Sarbanes–Oxley on executives may cause firms to temper this contracting outcome. We examine and find support for the joint hypothesis that the implementation of Sarbanes–Oxley and related reforms led to a decrease in earnings management and that firms responded by placing more weight on earnings in bonus contracts. We find no evidence that firms changed compensation contracts to compensate executives for assuming more risk.
To disentangle the issue concerning which dimensions of land rights, among security, tradability, and pledgeability, affect agricultural outcomes, this paper exploits a unique partial land rights ...entitlement program in Thailand that guarantees only security, allows a limited access to credit, and prohibits any land sale. Based on an instrumental variables strategy, I find that the entitlement increases (1) second-rice but not major-rice productivity, (2) land use intensity, and (3) land-related investment, and leads to (4) better soil quality. This suggests that the security dimension, alone, can play an important role in improving farm activities.
This article provides evidence on the relative performance of internationalised firms using Polish firm‐level data, spanning the period 1996–2005 and covering all medium and large enterprises. We ...distinguish between three modes of internationalisation: foreign direct investment, exporting and importing of capital goods. Our results point strongly at the superior performance of foreign affiliates vs domestic firms, exporters vs non‐exporters, and importers vs non‐importers: internationalised firms are larger, more capital intensive, pay higher wages and are more productive than purely domestic firms. Foreign ownership is the strongest factor accounting for gains from internationalisation. The premia from exporting are substantially lower, though also significantly positive. The performance of capital goods importers is also higher compared to non‐importers and is to some extent related to their involvement in other types of international activity. The results are robust to the choice of specification and productivity estimator. The analysed enterprises recorded a sizeable and broad‐based productivity improvement over the period under consideration. Not only the initial levels of productivity of exporters, importers and foreign affiliates were on average significantly higher that those of their non‐internationalised counterparts, but they also recorded faster productivity gains (manifested in increasing productivity premia), so that the discrepancies grew even larger. We also perform the analysis of productivity spillovers from internationalised firms onto own, downstream and upstream sectors. We find evidence of significant horizontal and backward spillovers from all three types of international activity. Our results suggest that trade externalities are rather of a horizontal nature, while those related to foreign direct investment operate mainly via backward linkages.
The mass media provides a frame for discourse around important health issues, and it has been widely demonstrated that the development and reinforcement of stereotypes of minority groups are strongly ...influenced by the news and entertainment media. An extensive search of academic databases failed to locate any studies which examined the representation of autism in the news media, although there were a number of articles on the media role in the autism and MMR debate. This paper reports on an examination of the extent, and nature, of coverage of 'autism spectrum disorders' in the Australian print media between 1996 and 2005. Key findings include a relatively limited amount of factual information and a dual stereotype of people labeled as having autism as either dangerous and uncontrollable or unloved and poorly treated. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the nature and tone of this coverage of autism and its potential impact on individuals described as 'autistic', their families and carers and the community in general.
We empirically analyze the illicit trade in cultural property and antiques, taking advantage of different reporting incentives between source and destination countries. We generate a measure of ...illicit trafficking in these goods by comparing imports recorded in United States' customs data and the (purportedly identical) trade recorded by customs authorities in exporting countries. This reporting gap is highly correlated with corruption levels of exporting countries. This correlation is stronger for artifact-rich countries. As a placebo test, we do not observe any such pattern for US imports of toys. We report similar results for four other Western country markets.
We apply duration analysis to model the tenure and mode of exit of CEOs from FTSE 350 companies from 1996-2005, a decade in which corporate governance reforms have sought to increase the ...accountability of the CEO to shareholders and their representatives on the board. We find a greater likelihood of dismissal in the latter part of the period. However, we also find that the likelihood of forced departure sharply decreases from the fifth year of a CEO's tenure. We find evidence that this is because CEOs who survive beyond year four are able to entrench themselves in their position.
This paper uses a large sample of individual banking organizations, observed from 1996 to 2005, to investigate the characteristics that made them more likely to be acquired. We use a definition of ...acquisition that we consider preferable to that used in much of the previous literature, and we employ a competing-risk hazard model that reveals important differences that depend on the type of acquirer. Since interstate acquisitions became more numerous during this period, we also investigate differences in the determinants of acquisition between in-state and out-of-state acquirers. We also employ a subsample of publicly traded banking organizations to investigate the role of managerial ownership in explaining the likelihood of acquisition. The hypothesis that acquisitions serve to transfer resources from less efficient to more efficient uses receives substantial support from our results, as do a number of other relevant hypotheses.
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