News from the frontier: Increased productivity dispersion across firms and factor reallocation

Paul Bouche, Gilbert Cette and Rémy Lecat

Working papers from Banque de France

Abstract: Analysing French firms over 1991-2016, we find first that since the beginning of the century, one or two downward significant productivity breaks have occurred in all industries, both at the frontier and for laggard firms, suggesting a decline in the contribution of technological progress to productivity growth. Second, the median labour share is always higher for the laggard firms than for the frontier firms, with a sharp decrease from the mid-1990s to 2008, and an increase from 2008 onwards. Third, factor reallocation decreased significantly in the 2000s, at the time when we observed an increase in productivity dispersion, with a growing productivity gap between frontier and laggard firms. It appears also that reallocation has been lower on average over the whole period for sectors with a high import share, which can be related to the impact of global value chains.

Keywords: Productivity; Frontier Firms; Reallocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 E24 J23 L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-eur, nep-lma, nep-mac, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Journal Article: News from the Frontier: Increased Productivity Dispersion across Firms and Factor Reallocation (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bfr:banfra:846

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