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Productivity Adjustments and Learning-by-Doing as Human Capital

November 1997

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The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Productivity Adjustments and Learning-by-Doing as Human Capital' are listed below in order of similarity.

• Working Paper

  
  
  Learning by Doing and Plant Characteristics
  

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  Authors: Ron Jarmin

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-96-05

  Learning by doing, especially spillover learning, has received much attention lately in models of industry evolution and economic growth. The predictions of these models depend on the distribution of learning abilities and knowledge flows across firms and countries. However, the empirical literature provides little guidance on these issues. In this paper, I use plant level data on a sample of entrants in SIC 38, Instruments, to examine the characteristics associated with both proprietary and spillover learning by doing. The plant level data permit tests for the relative importance of within and between firm spillovers. I include both formal knowledge, obtained through R&D expenditures, and informal knowledge, obtained through learning by doing, in a production function framework. I allow the speed of learning to vary across plants according to characteristics such as R&D intensity, wages, and the skill mix. The results suggest that (a) Ainformal@ knowledge, accumulated through production experience at the plant, is a much more important source of productivity growth for these plants than is Aformal@ knowledge gained via research and development expenditures, (b) interfirm spillovers are stronger than intrafirm spillovers, (c) the slope of the own learning curve is positively related to worker quality, (d) the slope of the spillover learning curve is positively related to the skill mix at plants, (e) neither own nor spillover learning curve slopes are related to R&D intensities. These results imply that learning by doing may be, to some extent, an endogenous phenomenon at these plants. Thus, models of industry evolution that incorporate learning by doing may need to be revised. The results are also broadly consistent with the recent growth models.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Decomposing Learning By Doing in New Plants
  

  December 1992

  Authors: Byong-Hyong Bahk, Michael Gort

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-92-16

  The paper examines learning by doing in the context of a production function in which the other arguments are labor, human capital, physical capital, and vintage as a proxy for embodied technical change in physical capital. Learning is further decomposed into organization learning, capital learning, and manual task learning. The model is tested with time series and cross section data for various samples of up to 2,150 plants over a 14 year period. Word Perfect Version
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Industry Learning Environments and the Heterogeneity of Firm Performance
  

  December 2006

  Authors: Natarajan Balasubramanian, Marvin Lieberman

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-06-29

  This paper characterizes inter-industry heterogeneity in rates of learning-by-doing and examines how industry learning rates are connected with firm performance. Using data from the Census Bureau and Compustat, we measure the industry learning rate as the coefficient on cumulative output in a production function. We find that learning rates vary considerably among industries and are higher in industries with greater R&D, advertising, and capital intensity. More importantly, we find that higher rates of learning are associated with wider dispersion of Tobin's q and profitability among firms in the industry. Together, these findings suggest that learning intensity represents an important characteristic of the industry environment.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Life Cycles of Industrial Plants
  

  October 2001

  Authors: Michael Gort, Seong-Hoon Lee

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-01-10

  The paper presents a dynamic programming model with multiple classes of capital goods to explain capital expenditures on existing plants over their lives. The empirical specification shows that the path of capital expenditures is explained by (a) complementarities between old and new capital goods, (b) the age of plants, (c) an index that captures the rate of technical change and (d) the labor intensiveness of a plant when it is newly born. The model is tested with Census data for roughly 6,000 manufacturing plants that were born after 1972.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Job Reallocation And The Business Cycle: New Facts An Old Debate
  

  September 1998

  Authors: Scott Schuh, Robert K. Triest

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-98-11

  This paper provides new facts on the nature of job reallocation over the business cycle, and addresses the question of whether reallocation causes recessions or recessions cause reallocation. Although we do not resolve the question of causality, two general findings emerge that advance our understanding of job reallocation and business cycles. First, much of the cyclical fluctuation in gross job flows occurs in larger plants with relatively moderate employment growth that tends to be transitory, especially at medium-term horizons (up to five years). Unusually large employment growth rates, especially plant startups and shutdowns, are primarily small-plant phenomena and tend to be permanent, less cyclical, and occur later in recessions. Further, high job flow rates occur primarily in plants previously experiencing sharp employment contractions or expansions. Second, key variables that should determine the allocation factors of production across plants and sectors do in fact appear to be related to gross job flows, particularly job destruction. Relative prices, productivity, and investment exhibit time series correlations with job reallocation that suggest that allocative driving forces may contribute significantly to business cycle fluctuations.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Managerial Efficiency, Organizational Capital and Productivity
  

  March 2003

  Authors: Michael Gort, Seong-Hoon Lee

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-03-08

  The paper focuses on the impact of managerial efficiency on output. Three sources of managerial efficiency are identified: (a) superior initial managerial endowments, (b) the accumulation of managerial knowledge and skills through learning and (c) the impact of an effective market for managerial resources internal to the firm. All three are explicitly measured by appropriate variables and their impact is examined in the context of variously specified production functions. The empirical analysis is carried out with data for approximately 5,000 new manufacturing plants in the United States over the 1973-92 period. It is found that variation in managerial endowments is an important explanatory variable for output with all other relevant inputs controlled. It is further found that the survival of plants with superior managerial efficiency, and the death of those with inferior efficiency, explains a substantial fraction of total factor productivity change in the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy. There is also clear evidence of the significance for efficiency of internal markets as well as evidence of learning as plants age. Learning and superior managerial resources of old plants largely offset the benefits of capital goods of later vintage of new plants.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Demand for Human Capital: A Microeconomic Approach
  

  December 2001

  Authors: Michael Gort, Seong-Hoon Lee

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-01-16

  We propose a model for explaining the demand for human capital based on a CES production function with human capital as an explicit argument in the function. The resulting factor demand model is tested with data on roughly 6,000 plants from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database. The results show strong complementarity between physical and human capital. Moreover, the complementarity is greater in high than in low technology industries. The results also show that physical capital of more recent vintage is associated with a higher demand for human capital. While the age of a plant as a reflection of learning-by-doing is positively related to the accumulation of human capital, this relation is more pronounced in low technology industries.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Effects Of Leveraged Buyouts On Productivity And Related Aspects Of Firm Behavior
  

  July 1989

  Authors: Donald Siegel, Frank R Lichtenberg

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-89-05

  We investigate the economic effects of leveraged buyouts (LBOs) using large longitudinal establishment and firm-level Census Bureau data sets linked to a list of LBOs compiled from public data sources. About 5 percent, or 1100, of the manufacturing plants in the sample were involved in LBOs during 1981-1986. We find that plants involved in LBOs had significantly higher rates of total-factor productivity (TFP) growth than other plants in the same industry. The productivity impact of LBOs is much larger than our previous estimates of the productivity impact of ownership changes in general. Management buyouts appear to have a particularly strong positive effect on TFP. Labor and capital employed tend to decline (relative to the industry average) after the buyout, but at a slower rate than they did before the buyout. The ratio of nonproduction to production labor cost declines sharply, and production worker wage rates increase, following LBOs. LBOs are production-labor-using, nonproduction-labor-saving, organizational innovations. Plants involved in management buyouts (but not in other LBOs) are less likely to subsequently close than other plants. The average R&D- intensity of firms involved in LBOs increased at least as much from 1978 to 1986 as did the average R&D-intensity of all firms responding to the NSF/Census survey of industrial R&D.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Do Employment Protections Reduce Productivity? Evidence from U.S. States
  

  March 2007

  Authors: William Kerr, Adriana Kugler, David Autor

  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.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Using the Survey of Plant Capacity to Measure Capital Utilization
  

  July 2011

  Authors: Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Matthew D. Shapiro

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  Most capital in the United States is idle much of the time. By some measures, the average workweek of capital in U.S. manufacturing is as low as 55 hours per 168 hour week. The level and variability of capital utilization has important implications for understanding both the level of production and its cyclical fluctuations. This paper investigates a number of issues relating to aggregation of capital utilization measures from the Survey of Plant Capacity and makes recommendations on expanding and improving the published statistics deriving from the Survey of Plant Capacity. The paper documents a number of facts about properties of capital utilization. First, after growing for decades, capital utilization started to fall in mid 1990s. Second, capital utilization is a useful predictor of changes in capacity utilization and other factors of production. Third, adjustment of productivity measures for variable capital utilization improves statistical and economic properties of these measures. Fourth, the paper constructs weights to aggregate firm level capital utilization rates to industry and economy level, which is the major enhancement to available data.
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