Organisation of Research
Tasks of the IWH Guided by its mission statement , the IWH places the understanding of the determinants of long term growth processes at the centre of the research agenda. Long…
See page
Harmonized MDI dataset - Visualization
Metadata Catalogue Search The tool below allows you to explore the data available in the MDI. It visually represents the coverage of a selected variable over time across different…
See page
Harmonized MDI dataset - Visualization
Metadata Catalogue Search The tool below allows you to explore the data available in the MDI. It visually represents the coverage of a selected variable over time across different…
See page
Research Articles
Research Articles Explore cutting-edge research based on CompNet’s micro-aggregated firm-level data and related analytical tools. These articles cover empirical and theoretical…
See page
Compnet Training Program
CompNet Training Program Structure The course is made for autonomous online learning. It is structured in three modules : Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced. Each of them…
See page
Reports
Reports Flagship Firm Productivity Report 2023 Introducing the release of the 2023 Flagship Firm Productivity Report , providing critical insights into the short-term impact of…
See page
Monetary Policy
Monetary policy How firms respond to sudden changes in profitability affects the process of job creation, job destruction, aggregate investment and how fast resources are…
See page
Firm Responsiveness
Firm responsiveness How firms respond to sudden changes in profitability affects the process of job creation, job destruction, aggregate investment and how fast resources are…
See page
MDI Program
Micro-data Infrastructure (MDI) Training The MDI Training is a three-session program designed to equip researchers (NPBs) with the skills to effectively work with cross-country…
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
