Schiffbauer, Marc

Person:
Schiffbauer, Marc

Global Practice on Macro & Fiscal Management, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

economic growth, trade, private sector development, firm productivity

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Global Practice on Macro & Fiscal Management, The World Bank

Last updated: March 14, 2025

Biography

Marc Schiffbauer is a Senior Economist and part of the team preparing the World Development Report 2016 on Internet for Development. Marc joined the World Bank in September 2009 working in the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management unit within the Eastern Europe and Central Asia as well as the Middle East and North Africa regions. Prior to that, he worked for the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in Dublin and as a consultant for the European Central Bank and the IMF on issues related to economic growth, firm productivity, and competition. Marc has a PhD in economics from the University of Bonn in Germany and was a one year visiting scholar at Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 18

Firm-Level Climate Change Adaptation: Micro Evidence from 134 Nations
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-10) Berg, Claudia; Bettarelli, Luca; Furceri, Davide; Ganslmeier, Michael; Grover Goswami, Arti; Lang, Megan; Schiffbauer, Marc
Are firms adapting to climate change? This paper studies this question by combining geocoded World Bank Enterprise Survey data with spatially granular weather data to estimate temperature response functions for nearly 160,000 firms in 134 countries over a 15-year period. Our results show that market imperfections in low- and middle-income countries constrain firms’ ability to adapt. Small and medium-size firms in low- and low-middle income countries are most vulnerable, with revenues declining by 12 percent in years with temperatures 0.5◦C above historical averages. The impact is equally strong for manufacturing and services firms and result from declines in labor productivity and wages. Heat-sensitive sectors and less resilient firms are more severely affected, reinforcing the causal interpretation. Unique firm-level information on policy constraints including limited financing, burdensome regulations, and unsafe conditions suggest that such factors raise adaptation costs, undermining economic resilience to climate change.
Procuring Low Growth: The Impact of Political Favoritism on Public Procurement and Firm Performance in Bulgaria
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-14) Fazekas, Mihaly; Poltoratskaya, Viktoriia; Schiffbauer, Marc; Tóth, Bence
This paper assesses the impact of favoritism in public procurement on private sector productivity growth. To this end, it combines three novel microeconomic data sets: administrative data on firms, including more than 4 million firm-year observations and rich financial and ownership information; public procurement transaction data for 150,000 published contracts and their tenders; and a newly assembled data set on firms’ political connections, drawing on asset declarations, sanction lists, and offshore leaks. This comprehensive data set allows tracing the impact of favoritism in allocating government contracts to economic growth. The findings show that politically connected firms are 18 to 32 percent more likely to win public procurement contracts due to their preferential access to uncompetitive tenders. Public procurement results in higher subsequent productivity and employment growth only if it has been awarded through competitive tenders. Firms winning contracts through uncompetitive procedures have flat growth but higher profit margins. Consistent with these findings, the paper shows that firms that are awarded uncompetitive public procurement contracts obtain rents of 9 to 11 percent from overpaid contracts. The results suggest that aggregate annual total factor productivity growth would have been 8 percent higher in the absence of favoritism in public procurement.
Frontier Firms and Job Creation in Bangladesh
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-25) Galal, Rami; Schiffbauer, Marc; Rossignol, Alice; Dexter, Gharam
Bangladesh has made notable developmental progress over the past two decades. Economic growth has been among the top 10 percent globally, and poverty has been reduced by 80 percent over the same period. Exports also saw a dramatic jump from US 6.5 billion dollars in 2000 to US 57.5 billion dollars in 2023. The private sector has played a critical role in this success, spurred by public policy that allowed the ready-made garments (RMG) sector to reach new heights. Bangladesh’s impending graduation from the United Nations’ least developed country (LDC) category in 2026 is a testament to these successes. The question is whether the country is now poised to continue this remarkable performance in the future under the current policy regime, especially in light of some disagreeable changes in the external environment and the emergence of new challenges at home. This report focuses on one of these challenges - namely, that of creating sufficient productive jobs through the private sector for a rapidly growing labor force.
Green Is Less Greedy: Competition, Corruption, and Productivity in Green Public Procurement in Bulgaria
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-26) Poltoratskaia, Viktoriia; Fazekas, Mihaly; Quintero, Maria Fernanda; Schiffbauer, Marc
Although green public procurement has been established as a desirable policy goal across the globe, especially in the European Union, its scope and impacts remain severely understudied. This paper provides insights into the prevalence and structure of green public procurement in Bulgaria, which is a sustainability laggard within the European Union and hence a least likely champion of green public procurement. The paper also estimates the impacts of green procurement on traditional procurement and economic outcomes: competition, corruption risks, and overall productivity. Using novel data and more comprehensive methods than previous studies, the analysis finds that green public procurement amounted to about 10 to 20 percent of total public procurement spending in Bulgaria in 2011–19. Most descriptors and requirements of green public procurement are found in titles, technical requirements, and product descriptions. Green criteria in award criteria texts, which are mainly used for flagging green public procurement in the literature, have been marginal in comparison. Green public procurement is estimated to improve competition for government contracts among firms, for example by increasing the prevalence of market entrants by 3 to 7 percentage points. Green public procurement contracts are also less prone to corruption risks. For example, they are 0.6 to 1.5 percentage points less likely to receive a single bidder. Finally, green public procurement enhances the efficiency of resource allocation in the economy by helping to channel public resources to more productive firms, for example to those that have 14 percent higher labor productivity. This effect is at least in part explained by the positive interaction between green public procurement and the lower risk of corruption. The findings strengthen the case for pursuing green public procurement goals as they offer synergies with traditional public procurement goals.
Serbia’s New Growth Agenda: State Aid
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03-26) Vasiljevic, Dusko; Schiffbauer, Marc; Shimbov, Bojan; Tan, Shawn
Serbia spends relatively large amounts on state aid programs, many of which will have to be phased out or restructured to comply with EU laws. There is room to restructure the existing programs to target activities that have more growth and job dividends; for example, by targeting startups and innovating firms and phasing out support for ailing industries, state-owned enterprises, and large or old private domestic firms. Although Serbia’s program to attract foreign direct investment has helped create new jobs, the focus should now shift to instruments that facilitate technology spillovers and domestic linkages. Finally, improving the scope and quality of data collection will contribute to better monitoring and more efficient targeting. The sooner Serbia starts to adjust its state aid programs, the larger the economic and fiscal benefits will be.
Enforcing Competition and Firm Productivity: Evidence from 1,800 Peruvian Municipalities
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01) Sampi, James; Schiffbauer, Marc
This paper uses a unique data set that captures the elimination of subnational regulatory barriers to firm entry and competition across 1,800 municipalities and matches it with establishment census panel data to estimate the impact on establishment productivity and markups. The elimination of local barriers that were inconsistent with national legislation was the result of legal reforms that strengthened the mandate of Peru's competition authority. Legislative changes in 2013/14 empowered the competition authority to enforce the elimination of illegal, sector-specific subnational regulatory barriers to firm entry and competition, conditional on the existence of a precedence. The changes provide a unique quasi-experimental setting to identify the impact of enforcing competition within the controlled institutional environment of a single country. The paper finds that the elimination of subnational barriers to entry boosted the (revenue) productivity of establishments operating in reform municipalities and sectors relative to establishments in nonreform municipalities/sectors. But it did not raise the establishments' markups, which, if anything, declined, suggesting that physical productivity improved. The paper provides a wide range of evidence supporting a causal interpretation of this finding. The results suggest that strengthening the mandate of institutions enforcing competition is critical to raise productivity.
Inflation, Liquidity and Innovation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-05) Evers, Michael; Niemann, Stefan; Schiffbauer, Marc
This paper presents a simple model with financial frictions where inflation increases the cost faced by firms holding liquid assets to hedge risky production against expenditure shocks. Inflation tilts firms' technology choice away from innovative activities and toward safer but return-dominated ones, and therefore reduces long-run growth. The theory makes specific predictions about how the severity of this adverse effect depends on industry characteristics. These predictions are tested with novel harmonized firm-level data from 139 developing countries, overcoming small sample problems constraining previous work. The analysis finds that inflation affects the composition but not the overall quantity of investment. A one percentage point increase in inflation reduces the establishment-level probability of innovation by 4.3 percent but does not affect total investment. Moreover, innovating firms display a stronger dependence on liquid assets, which, in turn, are negatively related to inflation. Generalized difference-in-differences estimations corroborate the sector-specific predictions of the theoretical model.
Do Foreign Mergers and Acquisitions Boost Firm Productivity?
(Elsevier, 2017-12) Schiffbauer, Marc; Ruane, Frances
This paper examines the causal relationship between foreign mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and the productivity of acquired firms using micro-data from the UK over the period 1999–2007. Our results suggest a significant heterogeneity in the total factor productivity (TFP) effects of foreign M&A at the industry level. Overall, we uncover a systematic pattern of post-acquisition TFP effects that is consistent with the most recent theoretical models of firm heterogeneity and cross-border mergers and acquisitions as mode of foreign entry. Furthermore, we find positive aggregate effects on labor productivity due to capital deepening but not due to changes in TFP.
Macro and Micro Features of Successful Economic Convergence: The Case of Poland
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01-09) Varela, Gonzalo; Schiffbauer, Marc
This paper examines the patterns of growth of Poland, and its transition into high-income status over the past two decades from a macro and micro perspective. It benchmarks Polish performance with that observed in established high-income countries, and with that of others that have been trapped in middle--income levels and examines the role that integration into the EU had on growth. The analysis reveals, first, that Poland’s growth process has been accompanied by a process of diversification of assets, including institutions, physical and human capital. Second, that the progressive integration into the EU bloc boosted growth and productivity because of three keyfactors: (i) increased openness to trade, investment and talent, (ii) increased domestic competition, and regulatory harmonization with EU, (iii) increased certainty in reforms, through a commitment to EU-institutions. Third, that for full convergence to high-income levels, Polish firms need to increase their innovative capacities. The paper extracts lessons applicable to other economies trapped in middle-income levels, as well as to Poland itself to consolidate growth looking forward.
Do Politically Connected Firms Innovate, Contributing to Long-Term Economic Growth?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06) Francis, David; Hussain, Sahar; Schiffbauer, Marc
This paper presents new evidence that cronyism reduces long-term economic growth by discouraging firms' innovation activities. The analysis is based on novel establishment survey data from The Arab Republic of Egypt which provides information on establishments' political connections, their innovation activities, and their access to policy privileges. The analysis finds that the probability that firms invest in products new to the firm increases from under 1 percent for politically connected firms to over 7 percent for unconnected firms. The results are robust across different innovation measures. Despite innovating less, politically connected firms are more capital intensive, as they face lower marginal cost of capital due to the generous policy privileges they receive, including exclusive access to input subsidies, public procurement contracts, favorable exchange rates, and financing from politically connected banks. These privileges are largest when compared with their direct competitors operating in the same 4-digit sectors. The findings suggest that connected firms out-rival their competitors by lobbying for privileges instead of innovating. In the aggregate, these policy privileges reduce Egypt's long-term growth potential by diverting resources away from innovation to the inefficient capital accumulation of a few large, connected firms. A wide array of supporting evidence suggests that this effect is causal and not due to selection.