Overview
About the project Project Information: ProdTool – NPB 2.0: Micro-Data Analysis Tool 2.0 for comparative productivity studies at National Productivity Boards (Project acronym:…
See page
At a Glance
IWH at a Glance The Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) – Member of the Leibniz Association was founded on January 1, 1992. It is a member of the Leibniz Association. It…
See page
Centre for Evidence-based Policy Advice
Centre for Evidence-based Policy Advice (IWH-CEP) The Centre for Evidence-based Policy Advice (IWH-CEP) of the IWH was founded in 2014. It is a platform that bundles and…
See page
14th CompNet Annual Conference
14th CompNet Annual Conference 25-26 September, 2025 in Vilnius, Lithuania Programme Highlights – 14th CompNet Annual Conference, Vilnius, 25–26 September 2025 The conference…
See page
Essays on Firms and Market Performance
Tommaso Bighelli
PhD Thesis, db-thueringen,
2024
Abstract
In Chapter 1, I combine longitudinal administrative firm-level data from Germany with 8,000 local tax changes for identification to show that local tax hikes (cuts) increase (decrease) the local manufacturing share. Firm-level results reveal that this is due to wage, employment, firm entry, and labor productivity in the service sector being more responsive to a tax shock than in manufacturing. With this evidence in mind, I calibrate a two-sector model with heterogeneous firms and profit tax to show that, owing to different structural parameters, a corporate tax cut disproportionately benefits service firms, contributing to the sectoral reallocation from manufacturing to service. In Chapter 2, we derive a European Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index from 15 micro-aggregated country datasets. We show that European concentration rose due to a reallocation of economic activity towards large and concentrated industries. Over the same period, productivity gains from an increasing allocative efficiency of the European market accounted for 50% of European productivity growth while markups stayed constant. Using country-industry variation, we show that changes in concentration are positively associated with changes in productivity and allocative efficiency. This holds across most sectors and countries and supports the notion that rising concentration in Europe reflects a more efficient market environment rather than weak competition and rising market power. In chapter 3, We study the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and related policy support on productivity. We employ an extensive micro-distributed exercise to access otherwise unavailable individual data on firm performance and government subsidies. Our cross-country evidence for five EU countries shows that the pandemic led to a significant short-term decline in aggregate productivity and the direct support to firms had only a limited positive effect on productivity developments.
Read article
East Germany
The Nasty Gap 30 years after unification: Why East Germany is still 20% poorer than the West Dossier In a nutshell The East German economic convergence process is hardly…
See page
Country Visits 2023
Country Visits In a forthcoming expedition from November 29th to December 1st, 2023, CompNet is set to embark on an insightful journey in Helsinki, Finland. On the agenda are…
See page
ProdTalks
CompNet ProdTalks CompNet ProdTalks is a monthly recurring 1.5 hour virtual event, two selected papers will be presented including presentation, discussion and Q&A. The top ic…
See page
Charts
Info Graphs Sometimes pictures say more than a thousand words. Therefore, we selected a few graphs to present our main topics visually. If you should have any questions or would…
See page
MICROPROD
MICROPROD Raising EU Productivity: Lessons from Improved Micro Data The goal of MICROPROD is to contribute to a greater understanding of the challenges brought about in Europe by…
See page
