Market imperfections, skills and total factor productivity: Firm-level evidence on Belgium and the Netherlands

This paper revisits the relationship between competition and total factor productivity by analyzing how the type and the degree of product and labor market imperfections affect different moments of total factor productivity distributions. Following the methodology developed in Dobbelaere and Mairesse (2013), we use an unbalanced panel of 5,285 firms over the period 2003-2011 in Belgium and 9,653 firms over the period 1999-2008 in the Netherlands to first classify 30 comparable manufacturing and service industries in 6 distinct regimes that differ in the type of competition prevailing in produc... Mehr ...