Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'yield'
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Chad Syverson - 2
Viewing papers 1 through 9 of 9
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Working PaperMisallocation or Mismeasurement?
February 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-07
The ratio of revenue to inputs differs greatly across plants within countries such as the U.S. and India. Such gaps may reflect misallocation which hinders aggregate productivity. But differences in measured average products need not reflect differences in true marginal products. We propose a way to estimate the gaps in true marginal products in the presence of measurement error. Our method exploits how revenue growth is less sensitive to input growth when a plant's average products are overstated by measurement error. For Indian manufacturing from 1985'2013, our correction lowers potential gains from reallocation by 20%. For the U.S. the effect is even more dramatic, reducing potential gains by 60% and eliminating 2/3 of a severe downward trend in allocative efficiency over 1978'2013.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAccounting for the New Gains from Trade Liberalization
March 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-14
We measure the "new" gains from trade reaped by Canada as a result of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA). We think of the "new" gains from trade of a country as all welfare effects pertaining to changes in the set of firms serving that country as emphasized in the so-called "new" trade literature. To this end, we first develop an exact decomposition of the gains from trade which separates "traditional" and "new" gains. We then apply this decomposition using Canadian and US micro data and find that the "new" welfare effects of CUSFTA on Canada were negative.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperREALLOCATION IN THE GREAT RECESSION: CLEANSING OR NOT?
August 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-42
The high pace of output and input reallocation across producers is pervasive in the U.S. economy. Evidence shows this high pace of reallocation is closely linked to productivity. Resources are shifted away from low productivity producers towards high productivity producers. While these patterns hold on average, the extent to which the reallocation dynamics in recessions are 'cleansing' is an open question. That is, are recessions periods of increased reallocation that move resources away from lower productivity activities towards higher productivity uses? It could be recessions are times when the opportunity cost of time and resources are low implying recessions will be times of accelerated productivity enhancing reallocation. Prior research suggests the recession in the early 1980s is consistent with an accelerated pace of productivity enhancing reallocation. Alternative hypotheses highlight the potential distortions to reallocation dynamics in recessions. Such distortions might arise from many factors including, for example, distortions to credit markets. We find that in post-1980 recessions prior to the Great Recession, downturns are periods of accelerated reallocation that is even more productivity enhancing than in normal times. In the Great Recession, we find the intensity of reallocation fell rather than rose (due to the especially sharp decline in job creation) and the reallocation that did occur was less productivity enhancing than in prior recessions.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperProductivity Dispersion and Plant Selection in the Ready-Mix Concrete Industry
September 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-25
This paper presents a quantitative model of productivity dispersion to explain why inefficient producers are slowly selected out of the ready-mix concrete industry. Measured productivity dispersion between the 10th and 90th percentile falls from a 4 to 1 difference using OLS, to a 2 to 1 difference using a control function. Due to volatile productivity and high sunk entry costs, a dynamic oligopoly model shows that to rationalize small gaps in exit rates between high and low productivity plants, a plant in the top quintile must produce 1.5 times more than a plant in the bottom quintile.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCementing Relationships: Vertical Integration, Foreclosure, Productivity, and Prices
July 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-21
This paper looks at the reasons for and results of vertical integration, with specific regard to its possible effects on market power as proposed in the theoretical literature on foreclosure. It uses a rich data set on producers in the cement and ready-mixed concrete industries over a 34- year period to perform a detailed case study. There is little evidence that foreclosure effects are quantitatively important in these industries. Instead, prices fall, quantities rise, and entry rates remain unchanged when markets become more integrated. We suggest an alternative mechanism that is consistent with these patterns and provide additional evidence in support of it: namely, that higher productivity producers are more likely to vertically integrate, and as has been documented elsewhere, are also larger, more likely to grow and survive, and charge lower prices. We explore possible sources of vertically integrated producers' productivity advantage and find that the advantage is tied to firm size, possibly in part through improved logistics coordination, but not to several other possible explanations.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperPlant 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%.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperInvestment Behavior of U.S. Firms Over Heterogenous Capital Goods: A Snapshot
December 2004
Working Paper Number:
CES-04-19
Recent research has indicated that investment in certain capital types, such as computers, has fostered accelerated productivity growth and enabled a fundamental reorganization of the workplace. However, remarkably little is known about the composition of investment at the micro level. This paper takes an important first step in filling this knowledge gap by looking at the newly available micro data from the 1998 Annual Capital Expenditure Survey (ACES), a sample of roughly 30,000 firms drawn from the private, nonfarm economy. The paper establishes a number of stylized facts. Among other things, I find that in contrast to aggregate data the typical firm tends to concentrate its capital expenditures in a very limited number of capital types, though which types are chosen varies greatly from firm to firm. In addition, computers account for a significantly larger share of firms' incremental investment than they do of lumpy investment.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperOutput Market Segmentation and Productivity
June 2001
Working Paper Number:
CES-01-07
Recent empirical investigations have shown enormous plant-level productivity heterogeneity, even within narrowly defined industries. Most of the theoretical explanations for this have focused on factors that influence the production process, such as idiosyncratic technology shocks or input price differences. I claim that characteristics of the output demand markets can also have predictable influences on the plant-level productivity distribution within an industry. Specifically, an industry's degree of output market segmentation (i.e., the substitutability of one plant's output for another's in that industry) should impact the dispersion and central tendency of the industry's plant-level productivity distribution. I test this notion empirically by seeing if measurable cross-sectional variation in market segmentation affects moments of industry's plant-level productivity distribution moments. I find significant and robust evidence consistent with this notion.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEstimating Capital Efficiency Schedules Within Production Functions
May 1992
Working Paper Number:
CES-92-04
The appropriate method for aggregating capital goods across vintages to produce a single capital stock measure has long been a contentious issue, and the literature covering this topic is quite extensive. This paper presents a methodology that estimates efficiency schedules within a production function, allowing the data to reveal how the efficiency of capital goods evolve as they age. Specifically we insert a parameterized investment stream into the position of a capital variable in a production function, and then estimate the parameters of the production function simultaneously with the parameters of the investment stream. Plant level panel data for a select group of steel plants employing a common technology are used to estimate the model. Our primary finding is that when using a simple Cobb Douglas production function, the estimated efficiency schedules appear to follow a geometric pattern, which is consistent with the estimates of economic depreciation of Hulten and Wykoff (1981). Results from more flexible functional forms produced much less precise and unreliable estimates.View Full Paper PDF
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