I quantify the contribution of sectoral shocks to business cycle fluctuations in aggregate output. I develop a multi-industry general equilibrium model in which each industry employs the material and capital goods produced by other sectors, and then estimate this model using data on U.S. industries sales, output prices, and input choices. Maximum likelihood estimates indicate that industry-specific shocks account for nearly two-thirds of the volatility of aggregate output, substantially larger than previously assessed. Identification of the relative importance of industry-specific shocks comes primarily from data on industries intermediate input purchases, data that earlier estimations of multi-industry models have ignored.
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Input Linkages and the Transmission of Shocks: Firm-Level Evidence from the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake
September 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-28
Using novel firm-level microdata and leveraging a natural experiment, this paper provides causal evidence for the role of trade and multinational firms in the cross-country transmission of shocks. Foreign multinational affiliates in the U.S. exhibit substantial intermediate input linkages with their source country. The scope for these linkages to generate cross-country spillovers in the domestic market depends on the elasticity of substitution with respect to other inputs. Using the 2011 Tohoku earthquake as an exogenous shock, we estimate this elasticity for those firms most reliant on Japanese imported inputs: the U.S. affiliates of Japanese multinationals. These firms suffered large drops in U.S. output in the months following the shock, roughly one-for-one with the drop in imports and consistent with a Leontief relationship between imported and domestic inputs. Structural estimates of the production function for these firms yield disaggregated production elasticities that are similarly low. Our results suggest that global supply chains are sufficiently rigid to play an important role in the cross-country transmission of shocks.
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Materials Prices and Productivity
June 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-11
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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Automation, Labor Share, and Productivity:
Plant-Level Evidence from U.S. Manufacturing
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-39
This paper provides new evidence on the plant-level relationship between automation, labor and capital usage, and productivity. The evidence, based on the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Manufacturing Technology, indicates that more automated establishments have lower production labor share and higher capital share, and a smaller fraction of workers in production who receive higher wages. These establishments also have higher labor productivity and experience larger long-term labor share declines. The relationship between automation and relative factor usage is modelled using a CES production function with endogenous technology choice. This deviation from the standard Cobb-Douglas assumption is necessary if the within-industry differences in the capital-labor ratio are determined by relative input price differences. The CES-based total factor productivity estimates are significantly different from the ones derived under Cobb-Douglas production and positively related to automation. The results, taken together with earlier findings of the productivity literature, suggest that the adoption of automation may be one mechanism associated with the rise of superstar firms.
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Small and Large Firms Over the Business Cycle
February 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-09
Drawing on a new, con dential Census Bureau dataset of financial statements of a representative sample of 80000 manufacturing firms from 1977 to 2014, we provide new evidence on the link between size, cyclicality, and financial frictions. First, we only find evidence of lower cyclicality among the very largest firms (the top 1% by size). Second, due to high and rising concentration of sales and investment, the lower sensitivity of the top 1% firms dominates the behavior of aggregate fluctuations. Third, we show that this differential sensitivity does not appear to be driven by financial frictions. The higher sensitivity of the bottom 99% does not disappear after controlling for measures of financial strength, is not statistically significant after
identified monetary policy shocks, and does not appear in debt financing flows. Evidence from 3-digit industries suggests a non-financial explanation: the largest 1% of firms are less sensitive due to a more diversified customer base.
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Industry Linkages from Joint Production
January 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-02
I develop a theory of joint production to quantify aggregate economies of scope. In US manufacturing data, increased export demand in one industry raises a firm's sales in its other industries that share knowledge inputs like R&D and software. I estimate that knowledge inputs contribute to economies of scope through their scalability and partial non-rivalry within the firm. On average a 10 percent increase in output in one industry lowers prices in other industries by 0.4 percent. Such economies of scope manifest disproportionately among knowledge proximate industries and imply large spillover impacts of recent US-China trade policy on producer prices.
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Firm-to-Firm Relationships and Price Rigidity Theory and Evidence
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-33
Economists have long suspected that firm-to-firm relationships might increase price rigidity due to the use of explicit or implicit fixed-price contracts. Using transaction-level import data from the U.S. Census, I study the responsiveness of prices to exchange rate changes and show that prices are in fact substantially more responsive to these cost shocks in older versus newly formed relationships. Based on additional stylized facts about a relationship's life cycle and interviews I conducted with purchasing managers, I develop a model in which a buyer-seller pair subject to persistent, stochastic shocks to production costs shares profit risk under limited commitment. Once structurally estimated, the model replicates the empirical correlation between relationship age and the responsiveness of prices to shocks. My results suggest that changes to the average length of relationships in the economy - e.g., in a recession, when the share of young relationships declines - can influence price flexibility and hence the effectiveness of monetary policy.
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Firm Dynamics, Persistent Effects of Entry Conditions, and Business Cycles
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-29
This paper examines how the state of the economy when businesses begin operations affects
their size and performance over the lifecycle. Using micro-level data that covers the entire universe of businesses operating in the U.S. since the late 1970s, I provide new evidence that businesses born in downturns start on a smaller scale and remain smaller over their entire lifecycle. In fact, I find no evidence that these differences attenuate even long after entry. Using new data on the productivity and composition of startup businesses, I show that this persistence is related to selection at entry and demand-side channels.
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Slow to Hire, Quick to Fire: Employment Dynamics with Asymmetric Responses to News
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-15
Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a united explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro and micro data. In particular, they generate countercyclical movement in both aggregate conditional 'macro' volatility and cross-sectional 'micro' volatility as well as negative skewness in the cross section and in the time series at different level of aggregation. Concave establishment level responses of employment growth to TFP shocks estimated from Census data induce significant skewness, movements in volatility and amplification of bad aggregate shocks.
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The Impact of Plant-Level Resource Reallocations and Technical Progress on U.S. Macroeconomic Growth
December 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-43
We build up from the plant level an "aggregate(d) Solow residual" by estimating every U.S. manufacturing plant's contribution to the change in aggregate final demand between 1976 and 1996. We decompose these contributions into plant-level resource reallocations and plant-level technical efficiency changes. We allow for 459 different production technologies, one for each 4- digit SIC code. Our framework uses the Petrin and Levinsohn (2008) definition of aggregate productivity growth, which aggregates plant-level changes to changes in aggregate final demand in the presence of imperfect competition and other distortions and frictions. On average, we find that aggregate reallocation made a larger contribution than aggregate technical efficiency growth. Our estimates of the contribution of reallocation range from 1:7% to2:1% per year, while our estimates of the average contribution of aggregate technical efficiency growth range from 0:2% to 0:6% per year. In terms of cyclicality, the aggregate technical efficiency component has a standard deviation that is roughly 50% to 100% larger than that of aggregate total reallocation, pointing to an important role for technical efficiency in macroeconomic fluctuations. Aggregate reallocation is negative in only 3 of the 20 years of our sample, suggesting that the movement of inputs to more highly valued activities on average plays a stabilizing role in manufacturing growth.
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Plant Turnover and Demand Fluctuations in the Ready-Mix Concrete Industry
March 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-08
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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