Materials Prices and Productivity
June 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-11
Abstract
There is substantial within-industry variation, even within industries that use and produce homogeneous inputs and outputs, in the prices that plants pay for their material inputs. I explore, using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the consequences and sources of this variation in materials prices. For a sample of industries with relatively homogeneous products, the standard deviation of plant-level productivities would be 7% lower if all plants faced the same materials prices. Moreover, plant-level materials prices are both persistent across time and predictive of exit. The contribution of net entry to aggregate productivity growth is smaller for productivity measures that strip out di'erences in materials prices. After documenting these patterns, I discuss three potential sources of materials price variation: geography, di'erences in suppliers. marginal costs, and suppliers. price discriminatory behavior. Together, these variables account for 13% of the dispersion of materials prices. Finally, I demonstrate that plants.marginal costs are correlated with the marginal costs of their intermediate input suppliers.
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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,
quantity,
market,
production,
manufacturing,
industrial,
sale,
cost,
commodity,
price,
monopolistic,
produce,
expenditure,
pricing,
revenue,
wholesale,
industry variation,
supplier,
practices productivity
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:
Census of Manufactures,
Center for Economic Studies,
Total Factor Productivity,
Cobb-Douglas,
TFPR,
TFPQ,
Commodity Flow Survey
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