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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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Has toughness of local competition declined?
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-13
Recent evidence on rm-level markups and concentration raises a concern that market
competition has declined in the U.S. over the last few decades. Since measuring competition is difficult, methodologies used to arrive at these findings have merits but also raise technical concerns which question the validity of these results. Given the significance of documenting how competition has changed, I contribute to this literature by studying a different measure of competition. Specifically, I estimate the toughness of local competition over time. To derive this estimate, I use a generalized monopolistic competition model with variable markups. This model generates insights that allows me to measure competition as the sensitivity of weighted-average markup to changes in the number of competitors using directly observable variables. Compared to firm-level markups estimation, this method relaxes the need to estimate production functions. I then use confidential Census data to estimate toughness of local competition from 1997 to 2016, which shows that local competition has decreased in non-tradable industries on average in the U.S. during this time period.
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The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment
December 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-59
This paper finds a link between the sharp drop in U.S. manufacturing employment beginning in 2001 and a change in U.S. trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries where the threat of tariff hikes declines the most experience more severe employment losses along with larger increases in the value of imports from China and the number of firms engaged in China-U.S. trade. These results are robust to other potential explanations of the employment loss, and we show that the U.S. employment trends differ from those in the EU, where there was no change in policy.
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ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION AND INDUSTRY EMPLOYMENT: A REASSESSMENT
July 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-36
This paper examines the impact of environmental regulation on industry employment, using a structural model based on data from the Census Bureau's Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures Survey. This model was developed in an earlier paper (Morgenstern, Pizer, and Shih (2002) - MPS). We extend MPS by examining additional industries and additional years. We find widely varying estimates across industries, including many implausibly large positive employment effects. We explore several possible explanations for these results, without reaching a satisfactory conclusion. Our results call into question the frequent use of the average impacts estimated by MPS as a basis for calculating the quantitative impacts of new environmental regulations on employment.
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Testing for Factor Price Equality with Unobserved Differences in Factor Quality or Productivity
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-32
We develop a method for identifying departures from relative factor price equality that is robust to unobserved variation in factor productivity. We implement this method using data on the relative wage bills of non-production and production workers across 170 local labor markets comprising the continental United States for 1972, 1992 and 2007. We find evidence of statistically significant differences in relative wages in all three years. These differences increase in magnitude over time and are related to industry structure in a manner that is consistent with neoclassical models of production.
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Entry Costs and Increasing Trade
December 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-38R
Using confidential microdata from the US Census, we find that the fraction of manufacturing plants that export rose from 21% in 1987 to 39% in 2006. It has been suggested that similar trends in other countries may have been caused by declining costs of entering foreign markets. Our study tests this hypothesis for the first time. Both reduced form and structural estimation approaches find little evidence that entry costs declined significantly for US firms over this period. Despite the large literature on changes in variable costs to trade such as tariffs, our estimations represent the first analysis of how the costs of entering foreign markets have changed over time.
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The Effects of Environmental Regulation on the Competiveness of U.S. Manufacturing
January 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-03
Whether and to what extent environmental regulations influence the competitiveness of firms remains a hotly debated issue. Using detailed production data from tens of thousands of U.S. manufacturing plants drawn from Annual Survey of Manufactures, we estimate the effects of environmental regulations'captured by the Clean Air Act Amendments' division of counties into pollutant-specific nonattainment and attainment categories'on manufacturing plants' total factor productivity (TFP) levels. We find that among surviving polluting plants, a nonattainment designation is associated with a roughly 2.6 percent decline in TFP. The regulations governing ozone have particularly discernable effects on productivity, though effects are also seen among particulates and sulfur dioxide emitters. Carbon monoxide nonattainment, on the other hand, appears to increase measured TFP, though this appears to be concentrated among refineries. When we apply corrections for two likely sources of positive bias in these estimates (price mismeasurement and sample selection on survival), we estimate that the total TFP loss for polluting plants in nonattaining counties is 4.8 percent. This corresponds to an annual lost output in the manufacturing sector of roughly $14.7 billion in 1987 dollars ($24.4 billion in 2009 dollars). These costs have important implications for both the intensity and location of firm expansions.
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An Alternative Theory of the Plant Size Distribution with an Application to Trade
May 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-10
There is wide variation in the sizes of manufacturing plants, even within the most narrowly defined industry classifications used by statistical agencies. Standard theories attribute all such size differences to productivity differences. This paper develops an alternative theory in which industries are made up of large plants producing standardized goods and small plants making custom or specialty goods. It uses confidential Census data to estimate the parameters of the model, including estimates of plant counts in the standardized and specialty segments by industry. The estimated model fits the data relatively well compared with estimates based on standard approaches. In particular, the predictions of the model for the impacts of a surge in imports from China are consistent with what happened to U.S. manufacturing industries that experienced such a surge over the period 1997'2007. Large-scale standardized plants were decimated, while small-scale specialty plants were relatively less impacted.
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The Green Industry: An Examination of Environmental Products Manufacturing
September 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-34
The "green industry" is often noted in discussions of the costs and benefits of environmental policy, and it has been characterized as a unique industry with substantial potential for employment growth, well-paying jobs, and export opportunities. In this paper, we examine the characteristics and recent economic performance of the green industry, using establishment-level data on environmental products manufacturers (EPMs) from the 1995 Survey of Environmental Products and Services, together with data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures and various Census of Manufactures. Results suggest that there are some differences between EPMs and their non-EPM counterparts in the same industry, in terms of employment, employee compensation, exports, and productivity. However, we do not find any evidence that EPMs performed any better than otherwise similar plants, in terms of survival, employment growth, wage growth, and export growth. Our findings offer a more complex and nuanced portrayal of the green industry than is typical, and we suggest that this industry may not be as exceptional as is sometimes maintained.
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Geographic Redistribution of the U.S. Manufacturing and The Role of State Development Policy
March 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-06
Competition among state and local governments to lure businesses has attracted considerable interest from economists, as well as legislators and policy makers. This paper quantifies the role of plant relocations in the geographic redistribution of manufacturing employment and examines the effectiveness of state development policy. Only a few studies have looked at how manufacturing firms locate their production facilities geographically; they have used either small manufacturing samples or small geographic regions. This paper provides broader evidence of the impact of plant relocations using confidential establishment level data from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Research Database (LRD), covering the full population of manufacturing establishments in the United States over the period from 1972 to 1992. This paper finds a relatively small role for relocation in explaining the disparity of manufacturing employment growth rates across states. Moreover, it finds evidence of very weak effects of incentive programs on plant relocations.
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