This paper is a technical document, designed to serve as a reference document for subsequent papers arising out of MultiProd, a project of the Committee on Industry, Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Working Party on Industry Analysis, aimed at studying productivity patterns across countries and over time. MultiProd provides harmonised micro-aggregated data of paramount importance for investigating the extent to which different policy frameworks can shape firm productivity and examining the way resources are allocated to more productive firms.

The paper discusses the project’s main contributions in relation to the current literature, in particular how using micro-aggregated data can help policy-makers understand and measure the efficiency of resource allocation in the economy, the dependence of economic activity on a small number of large firms, and wage inequality.