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 a¤ect di¤erent moments of total factor productivity distributions. Following the methodology developed in Dobbelaere and Mairesse (2013), we use an unbalanced panel of 5,285 ?rms over the period 2003-2011 in Belgium and 9,653 ?rms over the period 1999-2008 in the Netherlands to ?rst classify 30 comparable manufacturing and service industries in 6 distinct regimes that di¤er in the type of competition prevailing in product and... Mehr ...