We study the impact of the health crisis on the activity of more than 645,000 French companies using individual data to estimate their monthly turnover. Our microsimulation model is innovative in three ways. First, we quantify the loss of activity with respect to a non-crisis counterfactual situation to take into into account companies' growth trajectories before the pandemic when discussing the consequences of the crisis. Second, we estimate this shock at the individual level to study the heterogeneity of loss of business. We highlight the disparities of the shock both between and within sectors. The sector explains up to 48% of the variance of the monthly activity shocks observed in 2020, a much larger proportion than in a normal year. Finally, we identify four profiles of activity trajectories in 2020. The industry is the primary determinant of belonging to these profiles. Conditionally to the sector, these profiles are also correlated with the organisational adaptation of companies.
Affordable energy is often argued to be a vital condition for manufacturing industries to be able to compete on global markets. Consequently, the idea of introducing a (unilateral) carbon tax is usually opposed on the grounds of potential losses of competitiveness and leakage of economic activity abroad. In this paper, we shed light on one potential channel of such effects-the impact of energy prices on firms' outward FDI. Using an instrumental variable strategy we estimate the longer-term effects on a sample of listed firms from 9 manufacturing sectors in 24 OECD countries over 1995-2008. The results suggest that relative energy prices-that is the difference between domestic energy prices and prices in the potential FDI destination-are significantly and asymmetrically related to firms' outward FDI asset share. Only firms that faced increases in the relative energy prices have increased their international asset position and this effect was relatively small.
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