The allocatiion of resources across firms and aggregate productivity

• Autores: Manuel García-Santana
• Directores de la Tesis: Josep Pijoan-Mas (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP) ( España ) en 2012
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: James A. Schmitz Jr. (presid.), Claudio Michelacci (secret.), Samuel Bentolila (voc.), Markus Porsche-Ludwig (voc.), Nezih Guner (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Ciencias económicas
    • Economía general
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• Resumen

  • While research in macroeconomics has traditionally focused on understanding the determinants of knowledge production and diffusion in a context of a representative firm, a recent strand of literature has started to emphasize resource misallocation between sectors, or between firms, as a source of cross-country differences in aggregate productivity.

    In particular the focus has been to show how government policies that impose barriers on the size of large firms or promote small ones result in misallocation of capital, labor, and managerial talent. Some examples of this literature are Guner, Ventura, and Yi (2008), Restuccia and Rogerson (2008), Hsieh and Klenow (2009).

    This thesis contributes to this new line of research. First, this thesis documents some important evidence about the cross-country differences in the size distribution of plants. Second, this thesis shows the importance of foreign ownership to understand the size distribution of plants and aggregate productivity in low-income countries. Third, this thesis emphasizes the necessity of identifying particular policies and measuring their effects looking carefully at the characteristics of the economies where these policies are taking place.