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This article analyses the importance of intangible capital for firm productivity using comprehensive official firm-level data from German manufacturing. Both aggregate intangible investment and the share of investing firms increase over time. However, the distribution of intangible investment is heavily right-skewed, with many firms investing nothing or little and few investing a lot. This holds both for manufacturing overall and within narrowly defined industries. The group of top investors is highly persistent from year to year, and persistence increases over time. Production function estimations reveal a positive output elasticity of intangible capital which is small on average but increases substantially with firm-level intangible capital intensity. There are also effect heterogeneities by firm size and enterprise group membership, especially among high-intangible-intensive firms. Finally, considering intangibles as production factors reduces the measured dispersion of Total Factor Productivity (TFP), mainly by tightening the upper part of the TFP distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Who Benefits from State Corporate Tax Cuts? A Local Labor Market Approach with Heterogeneous Firms: Further Results" by Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato and Owen Zidar examines the impact of local business tax cuts on different stakeholders. The authors use a model to estimate the benefits received by firm owners, workers, and landowners. Their findings suggest that firm owners bear about half of the incidence, while workers and landowners bear 25-40% and 10-25% respectively. The article provides detailed identification results and discusses variations in the estimates. The study concludes that firm owners benefit from state corporate tax cuts. [Extracted from the article]

The article "Export-Platform FDI: Cannibalization or Complementarity?" examines the relationship between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and their production locations. It challenges the traditional view that improvements in one country's productivity reduce profitability in other countries. The authors propose a model that suggests MNEs' plant locations may not always be substitutes, but can instead generate complementarities. The article discusses the impact of changes in assembly potential, demand elasticity, labor substitution, and fixed costs on the sales and profitability of MNEs' plants. It concludes that the existence of complementarities in MNEs' export platform strategies contributes to the dominance of a small number of multinational firms in global trade. [Extracted from the article]