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Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'factory'

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Frequently Occurring Concepts within this Search

Center for Economic Studies - 26

Longitudinal Research Database - 18

National Science Foundation - 17

Annual Survey of Manufactures - 15

Standard Industrial Classification - 15

Ordinary Least Squares - 14

Total Factor Productivity - 14

Cobb-Douglas - 14

Bureau of Economic Analysis - 13

North American Industry Classification System - 12

Longitudinal Business Database - 11

Census of Manufactures - 11

Census of Manufacturing Firms - 10

Economic Census - 7

Bureau of Labor Statistics - 7

Special Sworn Status - 7

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - 6

Federal Reserve Bank - 6

World Bank - 6

National Bureau of Economic Research - 6

American Economic Review - 6

Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board - 5

International Standard Industrial Classification - 5

World Trade Organization - 5

Metropolitan Statistical Area - 5

Longitudinal Firm Trade Transactions Database - 4

University of Chicago - 4

Business Register - 4

Survey of Manufacturing Technology - 4

Current Population Survey - 4

Columbia University - 4

Commodity Flow Survey - 4

Chicago Census Research Data Center - 4

Journal of Political Economy - 4

Review of Economics and Statistics - 4

Value Added - 3

Harvard University - 3

Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey - 3

Standard Statistical Establishment List - 3

Department of Economics - 3

Foreign Direct Investment - 3

Decennial Census - 3

TFPQ - 3

Environmental Protection Agency - 3

North American Industry Classi - 3

Computer Aided Design - 3

New England County Metropolitan - 3

Heckscher-Ohlin - 3

Quarterly Journal of Economics - 3

production - 37

manufacturing - 34

industrial - 26

growth - 23

econometric - 20

manufacturer - 17

produce - 16

labor - 14

sector - 14

technological - 13

expenditure - 13

export - 12

economist - 11

demand - 11

macroeconomic - 10

factor productivity - 10

technology - 10

spillover - 9

investment - 9

economically - 9

estimating - 8

innovation - 8

multinational - 8

efficiency - 8

market - 8

growth productivity - 7

enterprise - 7

productivity growth - 7

plant productivity - 7

specialization - 6

import - 6

merger - 6

endogeneity - 6

industry productivity - 6

consumption - 6

econometrician - 6

productivity plants - 6

company - 5

endogenous - 5

producing - 5

sectoral - 5

tariff - 5

supplier - 5

productive - 5

gdp - 5

organizational - 5

employ - 5

product - 5

estimation - 4

productivity dynamics - 4

development - 4

monopolistic - 4

regional - 4

country - 4

outsourcing - 4

outsourced - 4

acquisition - 4

externality - 4

exporter - 4

wholesale - 4

technical - 4

labor productivity - 4

agriculture - 4

productivity dispersion - 4

patent - 4

plants industry - 4

plants industries - 4

heterogeneity - 4

textile - 4

invention - 3

rates productivity - 3

innovate - 3

innovating - 3

monopolistically - 3

cost - 3

depreciation - 3

profit - 3

establishment - 3

exporting - 3

exported - 3

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tech - 3

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productivity measures - 3

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industries estimate - 3

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disparity - 3

estimates productivity - 3

industry concentration - 3

industry variation - 3

conglomerate - 3

inventory - 3

regression - 3

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industrialized - 3

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Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 51


  • Working Paper

    The Rise of Industrial AI in America: Microfoundations of the Productivity J-curve(s)

    April 2025

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-25-27

    We examine the prevalence and productivity dynamics of artificial intelligence (AI) in American manufacturing. Working with the Census Bureau to collect detailed large-scale data for 2017 and 2021, we focus on AI-related technologies with industrial applications. We find causal evidence of J-curve-shaped returns, where short-term performance losses precede longer-term gains. Consistent with costly adjustment taking place within core production processes, industrial AI use increases work-in-progress inventory, investment in industrial robots, and labor shedding, while harming productivity and profitability in the short run. These losses are unevenly distributed, concentrating among older businesses while being mitigated by growth-oriented business strategies and within-firm spillovers. Dynamics, however, matter: earlier (pre-2017) adopters exhibit stronger growth over time, conditional on survival. Notably, among older establishments, abandonment of structured production-management practices accounts for roughly one-third of these losses, revealing a specific channel through which intangible factors shape AI's impact. Taken together, these results provide novel evidence on the microfoundations of technology J-curves, identifying mechanisms and illuminating how and why they differ across firm types. These findings extend our understanding of modern General Purpose Technologies, explaining why their economic impact'exemplified here by AI'may initially disappoint, particularly in contexts dominated by older, established firms.
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  • Working Paper

    The Role of R&D Factors in Economic Growth

    November 2024

    Authors: Lorenz Ekerdt

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-69

    This paper studies factor usage in the R&D sector. I show that the usage of non-labor inputs in R&D is significant, and that their usage has grown much more rapidly than the R&D workforce. Using a standard growth decomposition applied to the aggregate idea production function, I estimate that at least 77% of idea growth since the early 1960s can be attributed to the growth of non-labor inputs in R&D. I demonstrate that a similar pattern would hold on the balanced growth path of a standard semi-endogenous growth model, and thus that the decomposition is not simply a by-product of rising research intensity. I then show that combining long-running differences in factor growth rates with non-unitary elasticities of substitution in idea production leads to a slowdown in idea growth whenever labor and capital are complementary. I conclude by estimating this elasticity of substitution and demonstrate that the results favor complimentarities.
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  • Working Paper

    Multinational Production and Innovation in Tandem

    October 2024

    Authors: Jin Liu

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-64

    Multinational firms colocate production and innovation by offshoring them to the same host country or region. In this paper, I examine the determinants of multinational firms' production and innovation locations. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in tariffs, I find complementarities between production and innovation within host countries and regions. To evaluate manufacturing reshoring policies, I develop a quantitative multicountry offshoring location choice model. I allow for rich colocation benefits and cross-country interdependencies and prove supermodularity of the model to solve this otherwise NP-hard problem. I find the effects of manufacturing reshoring policies are nonlinear, contingent upon firm heterogeneity, and they accumulate dynamically.
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  • Working Paper

    Grouped Variation in Factor Shares: An Application to Misallocation

    August 2022

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-22-33

    A striking feature of micro-level plant data is the presence of significant variation in factor cost shares across plants within an industry. We develop a methodology to decompose cost shares into idiosyncratic and group-specific components. In particular, we carry out a cluster analysis to recover the number and membership of groups using breaks in the dispersion of factor cost shares across plants. We apply our methodology to Chilean plant-level data and find that group-specific variation accounts for approximately one-third of the variation in factor shares across firms. We also study the implications ofthese groups in cost shares on the gains from eliminating misallocation. We place bounds on their importance and find that ignoring them can overstate the gains from eliminating misallocation by up to one-third.
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  • Working Paper

    Import Competition and Firms' Internal Networks

    September 2021

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-21-28

    Using administrative data on U.S. multisector firms, we document a cross-sectoral propagation of the import competition from China ('China shock') through firms' internal networks: Employment of an establishment in a given industry is negatively affected by China shock that hits establishments in other industries within the same firm. This indirect propagation channel impacts both manufacturing and non-manufacturing establishments, and it operates primarily through the establishment exit. We explore a range of explanations for our findings, highlighting the role of within-firm trade across sectors, scope of production, and establishment size. At the sectoral aggregate level, China shock that propagates through firms' internal networks has a sizable impact on industry-level employment dynamics.
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  • Working Paper

    Rising Import Tariffs, Falling Export Growth: When Modern Supply Chains Meet Old-Style Protectionism

    January 2020

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-20-01

    We examine the impacts of the 2018-2019 U.S. import tariff increases on U.S. export growth through the lens of supply chain linkages. Using 2016 confidential firm-trade linked data, we document the implied incidence and scope of new import tariffs. Firms that eventually faced tariff increases on their imports accounted for 84% of all exports and represented 65% of manufacturing employment. For all affected firms, the implied cost is $900 per worker in new duties. To estimate the effect on U.S. export growth, we construct product-level measures of import tariff exposure of U.S. exports from the underlying firm micro data. More exposed products experienced 2 percentage point lower growth relative to products with no exposure. The decline in exports is equivalent to an ad valorem tariff on U.S. exports of almost 2% for the typical product and almost 4% for products with higher than average exposure.
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  • Working Paper

    A Portrait of U.S. Factoryless Goods Producers

    October 2018

    Authors: Fariha Kamal

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-18-43

    This paper evaluates the U.S. Census Bureau's most recent data collection efforts to classify business entities that engage in an extreme form of production fragmentation called 'factoryless' goods production. 'Factoryless' goods-producing entities outsource physical transformation activities while retaining ownership of the intellectual property and control of sales to customers. Responses to a special inquiry on the incidence of purchases of contract manufacturing services in combination with data on production inputs and outputs, intellectual property, and international trade is used to identify and document characteristics of 'factoryless' firms in the U.S. economy.
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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    In-migration and Dilution of Community Social Capital

    June 2018

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-18-32

    Consistent with predictions from the literature, we find that higher levels of in-migration dilute multiple dimensions of a community's level of social capital. The analysis employs a 2SLS methodology to account for potential endogeneity of migration.
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  • Working Paper

    Individual Social Capital and Migration

    March 2018

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-18-14

    This paper determines how individual, relative to community social capital affects individual migration decisions. We make use of non-public data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey to predict multi-dimensional social capital for observations in the Current Population Survey. We find evidence that individuals are much less likely to have moved to a community with average social capital levels lower than their own and that higher levels of community social capital act as positive pull-factor amenities. The importance of that amenity differs across urban/rural locations. We also confirm that higher individual social capital is a negative predictor of migration.
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