Productivity Dynamics: U.S. Manufacturing Plants, 1972-1986
February 1992
Working Paper Number:
CES-92-01
Abstract
This paper presents an analysis of the dynamics of total factor productivity measures for large plants in SICs 35, 36, and 38. Several TFP measures, derived from production functions and Solow type residuals, are computed and their behavior over time is compared, using various non-parametric tools. Aggregate TFP, which has grown substantially over the time period, is compared with average plant level TFP, which has declined or remained flat. Using transition matrices, the persistence of plant productivity is examined, and it is shown how the transition probabilities vary by industry, plant age, and other characteristics.
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.
:
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.
:
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 'Productivity Dynamics: U.S. Manufacturing Plants, 1972-1986' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperThe Life Cycle of Plants in India and Mexico
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-20
In the U.S., the average 40 year old plant employs almost eight times as many workers as the typical plant five years or younger. In contrast, surviving Indian plants exhibit little growth in terms of either employment or output. Mexico is intermediate to India and the U.S. in these respects: the average 40 year old Mexican plant employs twice as many workers as an average new plant. This pattern holds across many industries and for formal and informal establishments alike. The divergence in plant dynamics suggests lower investments by Indian and Mexican plants in process efficiency, quality, and in accessing markets at home and abroad. In simple GE models, we find that the difference in life cycle dynamics could lower aggregate manufacturing productivity on the order of 25% in India and Mexico relative to the U.S.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperIndustrial Investments in Energy Efficiency: A Good Idea?
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-05
Yes, from an energy-saving perspective. No, once we factor in the negative output and productivity adoption effects. These are the main conclusions we reach by conducting the first large-scale study on cogeneration technology adoption ' a prominent form of energy-saving investments ' in the U.S. manufacturing sector, using a sample that runs from 1982 to 2010 and drawing on multiple data sources from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Energy Information Administration. We first show through a series of event studies that no differential trends exist in energy consumption nor production activities between adopters and never-adopters prior to the adoption event. We then compute a distribution of realized returns to energy savings, using accounting methods and regression methods, based on our difference-in-difference estimator. We find that (1) significant heterogeneity exists in returns; (2) unlike previous studies in the residential sector, the realized and projected returns to energy savings are roughly consistent in the industrial sector, for both private and social returns; (3) however, cogeneration adoption decreases manufacturing output and productivity persistently for at least the next 7-10 years, relative to the control group. Our IV strategies also show sizable decline in TFP post adoption.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperU.S. Productivity and Electronic Processes in Manufacturing
October 2001
Working Paper Number:
CES-01-11
Recent studies argue that the use of information technology is a significant source of U.S. productivity growth. Official U.S. data on this use have been scarce. New official data on the use of electronic business processes (business processes such as procurement, payroll, inventory, etc.,conducted over computer networks) in the manufacturing sector of the United States were recently released. Preliminary estimates based on these data are consistent with some results in the literature. However, they also raise questions requiring additional detailed micro data analysis.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperFirm Leverage, Consumer Demand, and Employment Losses during the Great Recession
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-01
We argue that firms' balance sheets were instrumental in the propagation of consumer demand shocks during the Great Recession. Using establishment-level data, we show that establishments of more highly levered firms exhibit a significantly larger decline in employment in response to a drop in consumer demand. These results are not driven by firms being less productive, having expanded too much prior to the Great Recession, or being generally more sensitive to fluctuations in either aggregate employment or house prices. At the county level, we find that counties with more highly levered firms experience significantly larger job losses in response to county-wide consumer demand shocks. Thus, firms' balance sheets also matter for aggregate employment. Our research suggests a possible role for employment policies that target firms directly besides conventional stimulus.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Impact of Female Teachers on Female Students' Lifetime Well-Being
June 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-39
We document an enduring influence of female primary school teachers on their female students in rural America circa 1940. Using historical US Census data linked to IRS records, later censuses, and death records, we find that exposure to female teachers significantly improved girls' educational attainment'particularly among those with poorly-educated parents and in areas with limited labor market opportunities for women. These educational gains translated into delayed marriage and childbearing, marriage matches to better-educated husbands and higher household income. We also find that exposure to female teachers increased longevity of women relative to men.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperWorker Advancement in the Low-Wage Labor Market: The Importance of Good Jobs
July 2003
Working Paper Number:
tp-2003-08
View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperData in Action: Data-Driven Decision Making in U.S. Manufacturing
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-06
Manufacturing in America has become significantly more data-intensive. We investigate the adoption, performance effects and organizational complementarities of data-driven decision making (DDD) in the U.S. Using data collected by the Census Bureau for 2005 and 2010, we observe the extent to which manufacturing firms track and use data to guide decision making, as well as their investments in information technology (IT) and the use of other structured management practices. Examining a representative sample of over 18,000 plans, we find that adoption of DDD is earlier and more prevalent among larger, older plants belonging to multi-unit firms. Smaller single-establishment firms adopt later but have a higher correlation with performance than similar non-adopters. Using a fixed-effects estimator, we find the average value-added for later DDD adopters to be 3% greater than non-adopters, controlling for other inputs to production. This effect is distinct from that associated with IT and other structured management practices and is concentrated among single-unit firms. Performance improves after plants adopt DDD, but not before ' consistent with a causal relationship. However, DDD-related performance differentials decrease over time for early and late adopters, consistent with firm learning and development of organizational complementarities. Formal complementarity tests suggest that DDD and high levels of IT capital reinforce each other, as do DDD and skilled workers. For some industries, the benefits of DDD adoption appear to be greater for plants that delegate some decision making to frontline workers.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Relation among Human Capital, Productivity and Market Value: Building Up from Micro Evidence
December 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-14
This paper investigates and evaluates the direct and indirect contribution of human capital to business productivity and shareholder value. The impact of human capital may occur in two ways: the specific knowledge of workers at businesses may directly increase business performance, or a skilled workforce may also indirectly act as a complement to improved technologies, business models or organizational practices. We use newly created firm-level measures of workforce human capital and productivity to examine links between those measures and the market value of the employing firm. The new human capital measures come from an integrated employer-employee data base under development at the US Census Bureau. We link these data to financial information from Compustat at the firm level, which provides measures of market value and tangible assets. The combination of these two sources permits examination of the link between human capital, productivity, and market value. There is a substantial positive relation between human capital and market value that is primarily related to the unmeasured personal characteristics of the employees, which are captured by the new measures.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperHow to Compete: The Impact of Workplace Practices and Information Technology on Productivity
February 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-04
Using data from a unique nationally representative sample of businesses, the Educational Quality of the Workforce National Employers Survey (EQW-NES), matched with the Bureau of the Census' Longitudinal Research Database (LRD), we examine the impact of workplace practices, information technology, and human capital investments on productivity. We estimate an augmented Cobb Douglas production function with both cross section and panel data covering the period of 1987-1993 using both within and GMM estimators. We find that what is associated with higher productivity is not so much whether or not an employer adopts a particular work practice but rather how that work practice is actually implemented within the establishment. We also find that those unionized establishments that have adopted what have been called new or "transformed" industrial relations practices that promote joint decision making coupled with incentive based compensation have higher productivty than other similar non-union plants, while those businesses that are unionized but maintain more traditional labor management relations have lower productivity. We also find that the higher the average educational level of production workers or the greater the proportion of non-managerial workers who use computers, the higher is plant productivity.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMedicare Coverage and Reporting
December 2016
Working Paper Number:
carra-2016-12
Medicare coverage of the older population in the United States is widely recognized as being nearly universal. Recent statistics from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) indicate that 93 percent of individuals aged 65 and older were covered by Medicare in 2013. Those without Medicare include those who are not eligible for the public health program, though the CPS ASEC estimate may also be impacted by misreporting. Using linked data from the CPS ASEC and Medicare Enrollment Database (i.e., the Medicare administrative data), we estimate the extent to which individuals misreport their Medicare coverage. We focus on those who report having Medicare but are not enrolled (false positives) and those who do not report having Medicare but are enrolled (false negatives). We use regression analyses to evaluate factors associated with both types of misreporting including socioeconomic, demographic, and household characteristics. We then provide estimates of the implied Medicare-covered, insured, and uninsured older population, taking into account misreporting in the CPS ASEC. We find an undercount in the CPS ASEC estimates of the Medicare covered population of 4.5 percent. This misreporting is not random - characteristics associated with misreporting include citizenship status, year of entry, labor force participation, Medicare coverage of others in the household, disability status, and imputation of Medicare responses. When we adjust the CPS ASEC estimates to account for misreporting, Medicare coverage of the population aged 65 and older increases from 93.4 percent to 95.6 percent while the uninsured rate decreases from 1.4 percent to 1.3 percent.View Full Paper PDF
