Product Choice and Product Switching
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-22
Abstract
This paper develops a model of endogenous product selection within industries by firms. The model is motivated by new evidence we present on the prevalence and importance of product changing activity by U.S. manufacturers. Three-fifths of continuing firms alter their product mix within an industry every five years, and added and dropped products account for a substantial portion of firm output. In the model, firms make decisions about both industry entry and product choice. Product choice is shaped by the interaction of heterogeneous firm characteristics and diverse product attributes. Changes in market conditions within an industry result in simultaneous adjustment along a number of margins, including both entry/exit and product choice.
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.
:
demand,
investment,
market,
production,
productive,
manufacturing,
cost,
substitute,
manufacturer,
product,
merger,
industry productivity,
endogenous,
heterogeneous,
factory,
expenditure,
consumption,
exogenous
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.
:
Standard Industrial Classification,
Longitudinal Research Database,
National Science Foundation,
Center for Economic Studies
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 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Product Choice and Product Switching' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperProducts and Productivity🔥
August 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-22
When firms make decisions about which product to manufacture at a more disaggregated level than observed in the data, measured firm productivity will reflect both true differences in productivity and non-random decisions about which products to manufacture. This paper examines a model of industry equilibrium where firms endogenously sort across products. We use the model to characterize the direction and magnitude of the resulting bias in productivity and to trace the implications for evaluating the aggregate effects of policy reforms such as industry deregulation. The endogenous sorting of firms across products provides a new source of reallocation and leads to biased measures of deregulation's impact on firm and aggregate productivity.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMulti-Product Firms and Product Switching🔥
August 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-24
This paper examines the frequency, pervasiveness and determinants of product switching by U.S. manufacturing firms. We find that one-half of firms alter their mix of five-digit SIC products every five years, that product switching is correlated with both firm- and firm-product attributes, and that product adding and dropping induce large changes in firm scope. The behavior we observe is consistent with a natural generalization of existing theories of industry dynamics that incorporates endogenous product selection within firms. Our findings suggest that product switching contributes to a reallocation of resources within firms towards their most efficient use.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMulti-Product Firms and Trade Liberalization
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-21
This paper develops a general equilibrium model of international trade that features selection across firms, products and countries. Firms' export decisions depend on a combination of firm 'productivity' and firm-product-country 'consumer tastes', both of which are stochastic and unknown prior to the payment of a sunk cost of entry. Higher-productivity firms export a wider range of products to a larger set of countries than lower-productivity firms. Trade liberalization induces endogenous reallocations of resources that foster productivity growth both within and across firms. Empirically, we find key implications of the model to be consistent with U.S. trade data.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperSurvival of the Best Fit: Competition from Low Wage Countries and the (Uneven) Growth of U.S. Manufacturing Plants
October 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-22
We examine the relationship between import competition from low wage countries and the reallocation of US manufacturing from 1977 to 1997. Both employment and output growth are slower for plants that face higher levels of low wage import competition in their industry. As a result, US manufacturing is reallocated over time towards industries that are more capital and skill intensive. Differential growth is driven by a combination of increased plant failure rates and slower growth of surviving plants. Within industries, low wage import competition has the strongest effects on the least capital and skill intensive plants. Surviving plants that switch industries move into more capital and skill intensive sectors when they face low wage competition.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Deaths of Manufacturing Plants
June 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-15
This paper examines the causes of manufacturing plant deaths within and across industries in the U.S. from 1977-1997. The effects of international competition from low wage countries, exporting, ownership structure, product diversity, productivity, geography, and plant characteristics are considered. The probability of shutdowns is higher in industries that face increased competition from lowincome countries, especially for low-wage, labor-intensive plants within those industries. Conditional on industry and plant characteristics, closures occur more often at plants that are part of a multi-plant firm and at plants that have recently experienced a change in ownership. Plants owned by U.S. multinationals are more likely to close than similar plants at non-multinational firms. Exits occur less frequently at multi-product plants, at exporters, at plants that pay above average wages, and at large, older, more productive and more capital-intensive plants.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperSurvival of the Best Fit: Exposure to Low-Wage Countries and the (Uneven) Growth of U.S. Manufacturing Plants
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-19
This paper examines the role of international trade in the reallocation of U.S. manufacturing within and across industries from 1977 to 1997. Motivated by the factor proportions framework, we introduce a new measure of industry exposure to international trade that focuses on where imports originate rather than on their overall level. We find that plant survival and growth are negatively associated with industry exposure to low-wage country imports. Within industries, we show that manufacturing activity is disproportionately reallocated towards capital-intensive plants. Finally, we provide the first evidence that firms adjust their product mix in response to trade pressures. Plants are more likely to switch industries when exposure to low-wage countries is high.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperIPO Waves, Product Market Competition, and the Going Public Decision: Theory and Evidence
March 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-07
We develop a new rationale for IPO waves based on product market considerations. Two firms, with differing productivity levels, compete in an industry with a significant probability of a positive productivity shock. Going public, though costly, not only allows a firm to raise external capital cheaply, but also enables it to grab market share from its private competitors. We solve for the decision of each firm to go public versus remain private, and the optimal timing of going public. In equilibrium, even firms with sufficient internal capital to fund their new investment may go public, driven by the possibility of their product market competitors going public. IPO waves may arise in equilibrium even in industries which do not experience a productivity shock. Our model predicts that firms going public during an IPO wave will have lower productivity and post-IPO profitability but larger cash holdings than those going public off the wave; it makes similar predictions for firms going public later versus earlier in an IPO wave. We empirically test and find support for these predictions.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMicro Data and the Macro Elasticity of Substitution
March 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-05
We estimate the aggregate elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the US manufacturing sector. We show that the aggregate elasticity of substitution can be expressed as a simple function of plant level structural parameters and sufficient statistics of the distribution of plant input cost shares. We then use plant level data from the Census of Manufactures to construct a local elasticity of substitution at various levels of aggregation. Our approach does not assume the existence of a stable aggregate production function, as we build up our estimate from the cross section of plants at a point in time. Accounting for substitution within and across plants, we find that the aggregate elasticity is substantially below unity at approximately 0.7. Lastly we assess the sources of the bias of aggregate technical change from 1987 to 1997. We find that the labor augmenting character of aggregate technical change is due almost exclusively to labor augmenting productivity growth at the plant level rather than relative growth in capital intensive plants.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperExporting and Productivity: The Importance of Reallocation
June 2001
Working Paper Number:
CES-01-02
Exporting is often touted as a way to increase economic growth. This paper examines whether exporting has played any role in increasing productivity growth in U.S. manufacturing. While exporting plants have substantially higher productivity levels, there is no evidence that exporting increases plant productivity growth rates. However, within the same industry, exporters do grow faster than non-exporters in terms of both shipments and employment. Exporting is associated with the reallocation of resources from less ecient to more ecient plants. In the aggregate, these reallocation eects are quite large, making up over 40% of total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector. Half of this reallocation to more productive plants occurs within industries and the direction of the reallocation is towards exporting plants. The positive contribution of exporters also shows up in import-competing industries and non-tradable sectors.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEvidence for the Effects of Mergers on Market Power and Efficiency
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-43
Study of the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on productivity and market power has been complicated by the difficulty of separating these two effects. We use newly-developed techniques to separately estimate productivity and markups across a wide range of industries using confidential data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Employing a difference-in-differences framework, we find that M&As are associated with increases in average markups, but find little evidence for effects on plant-level productivity. We also examine whether M&As increase efficiency through reallocation of production to more efficient plants or through reductions in administrative operations, but again find little evidence for these channels, on average. The results are robust to a range of approaches to address the endogeneity of firms' merger decisions.View Full Paper PDF
