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Plant Turnover and Demand Fluctuations in the Ready-Mix Concrete Industry

March 2006

Written by: Allan Collard-Wexler

Working Paper Number:

CES-06-08

Abstract

Fluctuations in demand cause some plants to exit a market and other to enter. Would eliminating these 'uctuations reduce plant turnover? A structural model of entry and exit in concentrated markets is estimated for the ready-mix concrete industry, using plant level data from the U.S. Census. The Nested Pseudo-Likelihood algorithm is used to 'nd parameters which rationalize behavior of 'rms involved in repeated competition. Due to high sunk costs, turnover rates would only be reduced by 3% by eliminating demand 'uctuations at the county level, saving around 20 million dollars a year in scrapped capital. However, demand 'uctuations blunt 'rms'incentive to invest, reducing the number of large plants by more than 50%.

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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.

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:
demand, investment, market, production, econometric, macroeconomic, estimating, manufacturing, industrial, sale, cost, merger, produce, turnover, oligopolistic, yield, plants industry, budget

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:
Annual Survey of Manufactures, Internal Revenue Service, National Science Foundation, Center for Economic Studies, Permanent Plant Number, Insurance Information Institute, Longitudinal Business Database, Chicago Census Research Data Center, Department of Justice, Census of Manufacturing Firms, North American Industry Classification System, United States Census Bureau

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