Capital Investment and Labor Demand
February 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-04
Abstract
We study how bonus depreciation, a policy designed to lower the cost of capital, impacted investment and labor demand in the US manufacturing sector. Difference-in-differences estimates using restricted-use US Census Data on manufacturing establishments show that this policy increased both investment and employment, but did not lead to wage or productivity gains. Using a structural model, we show that the primary effect of the policy was to increase the use of all inputs by lowering overall costs of production. The policy further stimulated production employment due to the complementarity of production labor and capital. Supporting this conclusion, we nd that investment is greater in plants with lower labor costs. Our results show that recent policies that incentivize capital investment do not lead manufacturing plants to replace workers with machines.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
investment,
manufacturing,
payroll,
quarterly,
earnings,
productivity estimates,
expenditure,
depreciation,
revenue,
incentive,
subsidy,
wages productivity,
tax,
irs,
taxation
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Census of Manufactures,
Annual Survey of Manufactures,
Characteristics of Business Owners,
Internal Revenue Service,
Center for Economic Studies,
Total Factor Productivity,
Cobb-Douglas,
Bureau of Economic Analysis,
Longitudinal Business Database,
Council of Economic Advisers,
North American Industry Classification System,
Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics,
Information and Communication Technology Survey,
Russell Sage Foundation,
Quarterly Workforce Indicators,
UC Berkeley,
Herfindahl Hirschman Index,
Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board,
Kauffman Foundation,
Disclosure Review Board,
Indian Health Service,
Federal Statistical Research Data Center,
COVID-19
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with đŸ”¥ are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Capital Investment and Labor Demand' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperPayroll Tax Incidence: Evidence from Unemployment Insurance
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-35
Economic models assume that payroll tax burdens fall fully on workers, but where does tax incidence fall when taxes are firm-specific and time-varying? Unemployment insurance in the United States has the key feature of varying both across employers and over time, creating the potential for labor demand responses if tax costs cannot be fully passed through to worker wages. Using state policy changes and administrative data of matched employer-employee job spells, I study how employment and earnings respond to unexpected payroll tax increases for highly exposed employers. I find significant drops in employment growth driven by lower hiring, and minimal evidence of passthrough to earnings. The negative employment effects are strongest for young workers and single-establishment firms.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDo Employment Protections Reduce Productivity? Evidence from U.S. States
March 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-04
Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiring below efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affect productivity. These theoretical predictions have rarely been tested. We use the adoption of wrongful discharge protections by U.S. state courts over the last three decades to evaluate the link between dismissal costs and productivity. Drawing on establishment-level data from the Annual Survey of Manufacturers and the Longitudinal Business Database, our estimates suggest that wrongful discharge protections reduce employment flows and firm entry rates. Moreover, analysis of plant-level data provides evidence of capital deepening and a decline in total factor productivity following the introduction of wrongful discharge protections. This last result is potentially quite important, suggesting that mandated employment protections reduce productive efficiency as theory would suggest. However, our analysis also presents some puzzles including, most significantly, evidence of strong employment growth following adoption of dismissal protections. In light of these puzzles, we read our findings as suggestive but tentative.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperWhat Do Establishments Do When Wages Increase? Evidence from Minimum Wages in the United States
November 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-31
I investigate how establishments adjust their production plans on various margins when wage rates increase. Exploiting state-by-year variation in minimum wage, I analyze U.S. manufacturing plants' responses over a 23-year period. Using instrumental variable method and Census Microdata, I find that when the hourly wage of production workers increases by one percent, manufacturing plants reduce the total hours worked by production workers by 0.7 percent and increase capital expenditures on machinery and equipment by 2.7 percent. The reduction in total hours worked by production workers is driven by intensive-margin changes. The estimated elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is 0.85. Following the wage increases, no statistically significant changes emerge in revenue, materials or total factor productivity. Additionally, I nd that when wage rates increase, establishments are more likely to exit the market. Finally, I provide evidence that when the minimum wage increases the wages of some of the establishments in a firm, the firm also increases the wages for its other establishments.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperCreditor Rights, Technology Adoption, and Productivity: Plant-Level Evidence
April 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-20
I analyze the impact of stronger creditor rights on productivity using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Following the adoption of anti-recharacterization laws that give lenders greater access to the collateral of firms in financial distress, total factor productivity of treated plants increases by 2.6 percent. This effect is mainly observed among plants belonging to financially constrained firms. Furthermore, treated plants invest in capital of younger vintage and newer technology, and become more capital-intensive. My results suggest that stronger creditor rights relax borrowing constraints and help firms adopt more efficient production technologies.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperAutomation, Labor Share, and Productivity: Plant-Level Evidence from U.S. Manufacturing
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-39
This paper provides new evidence on the plant-level relationship between automation, labor and capital usage, and productivity. The evidence, based on the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Manufacturing Technology, indicates that more automated establishments have lower production labor share and higher capital share, and a smaller fraction of workers in production who receive higher wages. These establishments also have higher labor productivity and experience larger long-term labor share declines. The relationship between automation and relative factor usage is modelled using a CES production function with endogenous technology choice. This deviation from the standard Cobb-Douglas assumption is necessary if the within-industry differences in the capital-labor ratio are determined by relative input price differences. The CES-based total factor productivity estimates are significantly different from the ones derived under Cobb-Douglas production and positively related to automation. The results, taken together with earlier findings of the productivity literature, suggest that the adoption of automation may be one mechanism associated with the rise of superstar firms.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperGains from Offshoring? Evidence from U.S. Microdata
April 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-20
We construct a new linked data set with over one thousand offshoring events by matching Trade Adjustment Assistance program petition data to micro-data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We exploit this data to assess how offshoring impacts domestic firm-level aggregate employment, output, wages and productivity. A class of models predicts that more productive firms engage in offshoring, and that this leads to gains in output and (measured) productivity, and potential gains in employment and wages, in the remaining domestic activities of the offshoring firm. Consistent with these models, we find that offshoring firms are on average larger and more productive compared to non-offshorers. However, we find that offshorers suffer from a large decline in employment (32 per cent) and output (28 per cent) relative to their peers even in the long run. Further, we find no significant change in average wages or in total factor productivity measures at affected firms. We find these results robust to a variety of checks. Thus we find no evidence for positive spillovers to the remaining domestic activity of firms in this large sampleof offshoring events.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDo Short-Term Incentives Affect Long-Term Productivity?
March 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-10
Previous research shows that stock repurchases that are caused by earnings management lead to reductions in firm-level investment and employment. It is natural to expect firms to cut less productive investment and employment first, which could lead to a positive effect on firm-level productivity. However, using Census data, we find that firms make cuts across the board irrespective of plant productivity. This pattern seems to be associated with frictions in the labor market. Specifically, we find evidence that unionization of the labor force may prevent firms from doing efficient downsizing, forcing them to engage in easy or expedient downsizing instead. As a result of this inefficient downsizing, EPS-driven repurchases lead to a reduction in long-term productivity.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperCreditor Rights, Technology Adoption, and Productivity: Plant-Level Evidence
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-36
I analyze the impact of strengthening of creditor rights on productivity using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Following the adoption of anti-recharacterization laws that improve the ability of lenders to access the collateral of the firm, total factor productivity of treated plants increases by 2.6 percent. This effect is mainly observed among plants belonging to financially constrained firms. Furthermore, treated plants invest in capital of younger vintage and newer technology, and become more capital-intensive. My results suggest that strengthening of creditor rights leads to a relaxation in borrowing constraints, and helps firms adopt a more efficient production technology.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperCreditor Control Rights and Resource Allocation within Firms
November 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-39
We examine the within-firm resource allocation effects of creditor interventions and their relationship to performance gains at firms violating financial covenants. By linking firm-level data to establishment-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we show that covenant violations are followed by large reductions in employment and more frequent establishment sales and closures. These operational cuts are concentrated in violating firms' noncore business lines and unproductive establishments. We conclude that refocusing activities and improving productive efficiency are important mechanisms through which creditors enhance violating firms' performance.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDownward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States: New Evidence from Worker-Firm Linked Data
February 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-07
This paper examines the extent and consequences of Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity (DNWR) using administrative worker-firm linked data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) program for a large representative U.S. state. Prior to the Great Recession, only 7-8% of job stayers are paid the same nominal hourly wage rate as one year earlier - substantially less than previously found in survey-based data - and about 20% of job stayers experience a wage cut. During the Great Recession, the incidence of wage cuts increases to 30%, followed by a large rise in the proportion of wage freezes to 16% as the economy recovers. Total earnings of job stayers exhibit even fewer zero changes and a larger incidence of reductions than hourly wage rates, due to systematic variations in hours worked. The results are consistent with concurrent findings in the literature that reductions in base pay are exceedingly rare but that firms use different forms of non-base pay and variations in hours worked to flexibilize labor cost. We then exploit the worker-firm link of the LEHD and find that during the Great Recession, firms with indicators of DNWR reduced employment by about 1.2% more per year. This negative effect is driven by significantly lower hiring rates and persists into the recovery. Our results suggest that despite the relatively large incidence of wage cuts in the aggregate, DNWR has sizable allocative consequences.View Full Paper PDF
