MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4417344514 · doi:10.3386/w34573

On Productivity and Distortions across Countries

2025· report· W4417344514 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Diego Restuccia

Bibliographic record

VenueNational Bureau of Economic Research · 2025
Typereport
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCorruption and Economic Development
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersCanada Research Chairs
KeywordsProductivityExploitProduction (economics)Developing countryEmpirical researchAggregate (composite)Empirical evidence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I examine the empirical properties of firm-level productivity and distortions across countries using the newly released World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES).Using a standard framework of production heterogeneity, I show that the gap in productivity and distortions between high and low productivity firms is larger in developing countries, generating large aggregate productivity losses from misallocation.A key empirical property of distortions in developing countries is that they systematically weaken the relationship between firm size and firm productivity.I exploit a unique feature of the WBES data to document which specific aspects of the economic environment faced by firms, such as financial constraints, regulation, corruption, and weak infrastructure, are consistent with the empirical pattern of distortions across countries.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.036
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.014
Threshold uncertainty score0.029

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.036
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0050.010
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0030.002
Open science0.0000.003
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.346
GPT teacher head0.562
Teacher spread0.216 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueNational Bureau of Economic ResearchSame topicCorruption and Economic DevelopmentFrench-language works237,207