Chronological

We investigate how managers help firms grow by entering a new export market. We conduct an event study on the decision to export to Angola using data on Portuguese firms and workers. We evaluate the impact of the presence of managers with experience in exporting to the Angolan market on a firm’s entry success in the aftermath of an exogenous shock: the sudden end of the Angolan civil war. We show that the presence of managers doubles the probability of a firm entering the market. We do not find any significant impact on the intensive margin of exports.

This paper applies a general equilibrium occupational choice model to study the impact of optimism on the earnings of entrepreneurs and workers. We extend Lucas (1978) by assuming a fraction of individuals is optimistic about their ability as entrepreneurs. The model shows that optimism leads to a misallocation of talent and inputs which raises input prices and lowers output. The model is calibrated to match salient features of the UK economy and the British Household Panel Survey. The calibration shows that optimism can account for more than half of the size of the entrepreneurial earnings puzzle in the UK.

We build a multicountry dynamic general equilibrium model to study the economic effects of the 2004 enlargement of the European Union. In our model, trade is costly and households of different skills and nationalities face costly forward-looking migration decisions. We exploit the timing of migration policy changes to identify the changes in migration costs. We find that the changes in migration and trade policy resulted in aggregate welfare gains but with heterogeneous effects across skill groups. We study the interaction between trade and migration policies and highlight the importance of trade for quantifying the welfare and migration effects of labor market integration.

Using employer-employee matched and firm production quantity and input data for Portuguese firms, we study the endogenous response of productivity to firm reorganizations as measured by changes in the number of management layers. We show that, as a result of an exogenous demand or productivity shock that makes the firm reorganize and add a management layer, quantity-based productivity increases by about 6%, while revenue-based productivity drops by around 3%. Such a reorganization makes the firm more productive but also increases the quantity produced to an extent that lowers the price charged by the firm and, as a result, its revenue-based productivity as well.

The administration of tax policy has shifted its focus from enforcement to complementary instruments aimed at creating a social norm of tax compliance. In this paper we provide an analysis of the effects of information regarding the past degree of tax evasion at the social level on the current individual tax compliance behavior. We build an experiment where subjects declare their income after receiving either a communication of the average tax evasion rate (“official information”) or a private message from a group of randomly matched peers about their tax behavior (“unofficial information”). We use the experimental data to estimate a dynamic econometric model of tax evasion and find three main results. First, tax compliance is very persistent, but less so in the presence of information. Second, the higher the officially communicated past tax evasion rate, the higher the degree of persistence: former evaders are more likely to evade again (and evade more), and former compliant individuals are more likely to comply again (and, when evading, evade less). Third, when an unofficial communication of past evasion (compliance) from all their peers is received, both former evaders and compliant individuals are more likely to evade (comply) again.

Trade costs are often additive. Well-known examples are quotas, per unit tariffs, and, in part, transportation costs. In spite of this, we have no broad and systematic evidence of the magnitude of these costs. In this paper, we develop a new empirical framework for estimating additive trade costs from standard firm-level trade data. Our results suggest that additive barriers are on average 14%, expressed relative to the median price. The point estimates are strongly correlated with common proxies for trade costs. Using our microestimates, we show that an additive import tariff reduces welfare and trade by more than an equal-yield multiplicative tariff.

Knowledge is key to the competitiveness and success of an organization and in particular of a firm. Firms and their managers acquire knowledge via a variety of different channels which are often difficult to track down and quantify. By matching employer–employee data with trade data at the firm level we show that the export experience acquired by managers in previous firms leads their current firm toward higher export performance, and commands a sizeable wage premium for the manager. Moreover, export knowledge is decisive when it is market-specific: managers with experience related to markets served by their current firm receive an even higher wage premium; firms are more likely to enter markets where their managers have experience; exporters are more likely to stay in those markets, and their sales are on average higher. Our findings are robust to controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and, more broadly, endogeneity and indicate that managers' export experience is a first-order feature in the data with an impact on a firm's export performance that is, for example, at least as strong as that of firm productivity.

Multinational production (MP) can lead to large gains through international technology sharing. However, empirical evidence suggests that geography matters for MP: Affiliate sales fall in distance from the headquarters. We introduce intrafirm trade into a standard model of exports and MP and show that the model is consistent with firm-level and aggregate evidence. Using a maximum likelihood estimator, we find that intrafirm trade plays a crucial role in shaping the geography of MP. An implication of our work is that MP and exports are very similar activities. Consequently, shutting down MP leads to relatively small welfare losses.

This paper introduces idiosyncratic firm efficiency shocks into a continuous-time general equilibrium model of trade with heterogeneous firms. The presence of sunk export entry costs and efficiency uncertainty gives rise to hysteresis in export market participation. A firm will enter into the export market once it achieves a given size, reflecting its efficiency, but may keep exporting even after its efficiency has fallen below its initial entry level. Some exporters will not be selling as much in the domestic market as other firms that never entered the foreign market. The model captures the qualitative features of firm birth, growth, export market entry and exit, and death found in the empirical literature. We calibrate the model to match relevant statistics of firms' turnover and export dynamics in the United States, and show that the mode of globalization (a reduction in sunk costs as opposed to overhead costs), matters for a firm's selection and persistence in export status. Trade liberalization via a reduction in sunk export entry costs reduces firm's export status persistence, while the opposite happens when liberalization takes place through a reduction in overhead export costs.

This article studies the joint destination and product strategies of exporters, using the universe of export transactions for firms located in Portugal in the period 1995–2005. The article breaks down the annual growth rate of total exports along different margins and details choices made by multi-product, multi-destination firms regarding their export portfolio. In addition, the article looks at similar features for the subsample of new exporters. We find that both the firm-level extensive and intensive margins are important in driving the year-to-year variation in aggregate exports. However, variation over time in the sales of continuing exporters is mainly driven by their sales in continuing destinations. In addition, a product’s export tenure within a firm varies largely across currently exported products in the context of an intense activity of product and destination switching. Moreover, the higher the importance of a product, the more its sales are concentrated in the firm’s top destination. Finally, the article finds that, while continuing exporters enter new markets mainly by selling old products, new exporters access new destinations mainly by exporting new products.

European countries experienced a large increase in labor supply due to the influx of Ukrainian refugees after the 2022 Russia invasion. We study its dynamic effects in a spatial model with forward-looking households of different skills, trade, and endogenous capital accumulation. We find that real GDP increases in Europe in the long term, with large distributional effects across countries and skill groups. In the short run, an increase in the supply of labor strains the use of capital structures that takes time to build. Over time, countries that build capital structures increase output, resulting in potential long run benefits.

We provide both a theoretical framework and a number of empirical results highlighting how jobs in internationally active firms differ from those in internationally inactive firms in terms of their impact on a worker’s lifetime wage income profile through wage jumps occurring upon changing job (‘static effects’) or through increases in the wage growth rate (‘dynamic effects’). First, in internationally active firms the experience-wage profile is much steeper than in other firms, especially for managers as opposed to blue-collar workers. Second, the higher lifetime wage income for managers in internationally active firms relies on the stronger accumulation of experience that these firms allow for and on the (almost) perfect portability of the accumulated dynamic wage gains to other firms. Static effects are instead much more important for blue-collar workers. Finally, the distinction between jobs in internationally active and inactive firms is relevant also at a more aggregate level to explain cross-sectional differences in wages among workers and spatial differences in average wages across regions within a country.

We investigate how managers help firms grow by entering a new export market. We conduct an event study on the decision to export to Angola using data on Portuguese firms and workers. We evaluate the impact of the presence of managers with experience in exporting to the Angolan market on a firm’s entry success in the aftermath of an exogenous shock: the sudden end of the Angolan civil war. We show that the presence of managers doubles the probability of a firm entering the market. We do not find any significant impact on the intensive margin of exports.

We build a multicountry dynamic general equilibrium model to study the economic effects of the 2004 enlargement of the European Union. In our model, trade is costly and households of different skills and nationalities face costly forward-looking migration decisions. We exploit the timing of migration policy changes to identify the changes in migration costs. We find that the changes in migration and trade policy resulted in aggregate welfare gains but with heterogeneous effects across skill groups. We study the interaction between trade and migration policies and highlight the importance of trade for quantifying the welfare and migration effects of labor market integration.

Trade costs are often additive. Well-known examples are quotas, per unit tariffs, and, in part, transportation costs. In spite of this, we have no broad and systematic evidence of the magnitude of these costs. In this paper, we develop a new empirical framework for estimating additive trade costs from standard firm-level trade data. Our results suggest that additive barriers are on average 14%, expressed relative to the median price. The point estimates are strongly correlated with common proxies for trade costs. Using our microestimates, we show that an additive import tariff reduces welfare and trade by more than an equal-yield multiplicative tariff.

Knowledge is key to the competitiveness and success of an organization and in particular of a firm. Firms and their managers acquire knowledge via a variety of different channels which are often difficult to track down and quantify. By matching employer–employee data with trade data at the firm level we show that the export experience acquired by managers in previous firms leads their current firm toward higher export performance, and commands a sizeable wage premium for the manager. Moreover, export knowledge is decisive when it is market-specific: managers with experience related to markets served by their current firm receive an even higher wage premium; firms are more likely to enter markets where their managers have experience; exporters are more likely to stay in those markets, and their sales are on average higher. Our findings are robust to controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and, more broadly, endogeneity and indicate that managers' export experience is a first-order feature in the data with an impact on a firm's export performance that is, for example, at least as strong as that of firm productivity.

This paper introduces idiosyncratic firm efficiency shocks into a continuous-time general equilibrium model of trade with heterogeneous firms. The presence of sunk export entry costs and efficiency uncertainty gives rise to hysteresis in export market participation. A firm will enter into the export market once it achieves a given size, reflecting its efficiency, but may keep exporting even after its efficiency has fallen below its initial entry level. Some exporters will not be selling as much in the domestic market as other firms that never entered the foreign market. The model captures the qualitative features of firm birth, growth, export market entry and exit, and death found in the empirical literature. We calibrate the model to match relevant statistics of firms' turnover and export dynamics in the United States, and show that the mode of globalization (a reduction in sunk costs as opposed to overhead costs), matters for a firm's selection and persistence in export status. Trade liberalization via a reduction in sunk export entry costs reduces firm's export status persistence, while the opposite happens when liberalization takes place through a reduction in overhead export costs.

Multinational production (MP) can lead to large gains through international technology sharing. However, empirical evidence suggests that geography matters for MP: Affiliate sales fall in distance from the headquarters. We introduce intrafirm trade into a standard model of exports and MP and show that the model is consistent with firm-level and aggregate evidence. Using a maximum likelihood estimator, we find that intrafirm trade plays a crucial role in shaping the geography of MP. An implication of our work is that MP and exports are very similar activities. Consequently, shutting down MP leads to relatively small welfare losses.

This article studies the joint destination and product strategies of exporters, using the universe of export transactions for firms located in Portugal in the period 1995–2005. The article breaks down the annual growth rate of total exports along different margins and details choices made by multi-product, multi-destination firms regarding their export portfolio. In addition, the article looks at similar features for the subsample of new exporters. We find that both the firm-level extensive and intensive margins are important in driving the year-to-year variation in aggregate exports. However, variation over time in the sales of continuing exporters is mainly driven by their sales in continuing destinations. In addition, a product’s export tenure within a firm varies largely across currently exported products in the context of an intense activity of product and destination switching. Moreover, the higher the importance of a product, the more its sales are concentrated in the firm’s top destination. Finally, the article finds that, while continuing exporters enter new markets mainly by selling old products, new exporters access new destinations mainly by exporting new products.

We provide both a theoretical framework and a number of empirical results highlighting how jobs in internationally active firms differ from those in internationally inactive firms in terms of their impact on a worker’s lifetime wage income profile through wage jumps occurring upon changing job (‘static effects’) or through increases in the wage growth rate (‘dynamic effects’). First, in internationally active firms the experience-wage profile is much steeper than in other firms, especially for managers as opposed to blue-collar workers. Second, the higher lifetime wage income for managers in internationally active firms relies on the stronger accumulation of experience that these firms allow for and on the (almost) perfect portability of the accumulated dynamic wage gains to other firms. Static effects are instead much more important for blue-collar workers. Finally, the distinction between jobs in internationally active and inactive firms is relevant also at a more aggregate level to explain cross-sectional differences in wages among workers and spatial differences in average wages across regions within a country.

We investigate how managers help firms grow by entering a new export market. We conduct an event study on the decision to export to Angola using data on Portuguese firms and workers. We evaluate the impact of the presence of managers with experience in exporting to the Angolan market on a firm’s entry success in the aftermath of an exogenous shock: the sudden end of the Angolan civil war. We show that the presence of managers doubles the probability of a firm entering the market. We do not find any significant impact on the intensive margin of exports.

This paper applies a general equilibrium occupational choice model to study the impact of optimism on the earnings of entrepreneurs and workers. We extend Lucas (1978) by assuming a fraction of individuals is optimistic about their ability as entrepreneurs. The model shows that optimism leads to a misallocation of talent and inputs which raises input prices and lowers output. The model is calibrated to match salient features of the UK economy and the British Household Panel Survey. The calibration shows that optimism can account for more than half of the size of the entrepreneurial earnings puzzle in the UK.

Knowledge is key to the competitiveness and success of an organization and in particular of a firm. Firms and their managers acquire knowledge via a variety of different channels which are often difficult to track down and quantify. By matching employer–employee data with trade data at the firm level we show that the export experience acquired by managers in previous firms leads their current firm toward higher export performance, and commands a sizeable wage premium for the manager. Moreover, export knowledge is decisive when it is market-specific: managers with experience related to markets served by their current firm receive an even higher wage premium; firms are more likely to enter markets where their managers have experience; exporters are more likely to stay in those markets, and their sales are on average higher. Our findings are robust to controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and, more broadly, endogeneity and indicate that managers' export experience is a first-order feature in the data with an impact on a firm's export performance that is, for example, at least as strong as that of firm productivity.

Using employer-employee matched and firm production quantity and input data for Portuguese firms, we study the endogenous response of productivity to firm reorganizations as measured by changes in the number of management layers. We show that, as a result of an exogenous demand or productivity shock that makes the firm reorganize and add a management layer, quantity-based productivity increases by about 6%, while revenue-based productivity drops by around 3%. Such a reorganization makes the firm more productive but also increases the quantity produced to an extent that lowers the price charged by the firm and, as a result, its revenue-based productivity as well.

This paper introduces idiosyncratic firm efficiency shocks into a continuous-time general equilibrium model of trade with heterogeneous firms. The presence of sunk export entry costs and efficiency uncertainty gives rise to hysteresis in export market participation. A firm will enter into the export market once it achieves a given size, reflecting its efficiency, but may keep exporting even after its efficiency has fallen below its initial entry level. Some exporters will not be selling as much in the domestic market as other firms that never entered the foreign market. The model captures the qualitative features of firm birth, growth, export market entry and exit, and death found in the empirical literature. We calibrate the model to match relevant statistics of firms' turnover and export dynamics in the United States, and show that the mode of globalization (a reduction in sunk costs as opposed to overhead costs), matters for a firm's selection and persistence in export status. Trade liberalization via a reduction in sunk export entry costs reduces firm's export status persistence, while the opposite happens when liberalization takes place through a reduction in overhead export costs.