The multifaceted evolution of industries: sectoral and firm-level evidence

The Great Recession of 2008 has not only marked a general fall in the level of gross domestic product (GDP) across the world. The crisis has also been nested with some worrying trends that were already ongoing prior to it. First, and especially within the Eurozone, the crisis has exacerbated structural differences in current account balances. Countries like Germany have seen their market shares in export markets growing. The opposite occurred in France, or even more so in Southern countries like Greece, Spain, and, to a lesser extent, Italy. This has brought even more to the fore the problem of understanding the determinants of firms' ability to compete in export markets, a problem that was already posed by the rise in global competition stemming from countries like China.
Second, the diverging dynamics in export markets across countries have been coupled with a much longer standing divergence in income paths across...