Advisory Board
Advisory Board The CompNet Advisory Board is composed of distinguished scholars and leading experts in the fields of productivity, competitiveness, and economic policy, and also…
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Alumni
IWH Alumni The IWH maintains contact with its former employees worldwide. We involve our alumni in our work and keep them informed, for example, with a newsletter. We also plan…
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4th TSI Workshop
4th TSI Workshop The 4th Technical Support Instrument (TSI) Workshop was a significant event in the TSI program series, focusing on enhancing collaboration among National…
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2nd TSI Workshop
Presentations 2nd TSI Workshop - Halle, Germany Welcome Note - Filippo di Mauro 1. Energy - Laura Lehtonen, Alessansdro Zona Mattioli 2. Competitiveness - Marco Matani, Sara…
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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…
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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…
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Energy
Energy This research project focused on understanding the various channels through which energy efficiency is achieved within firms. The study aims to investigate these channels…
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Trade and Competitiveness
Trade and Competitiveness The investigation delves into the mechanisms through which productivity diffuses within Global Value Chains (GVC), assessing how national firms respond…
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MDI Research Lab
Extended MDI Output The Extended MDI Output research projects encompass diverse areas, including Trade and Competitiveness, investigating productivity diffusion within Global…
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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.
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