-
The Impact of Heterogeneous NOx Regulations on Distributed Electricity Generation in U.S. Manufacturing
April 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-12
The US EPA's command-and-control NOx policies of the early 1990s are associated with a 3.1 percentage point reduction in the likelihood of manufacturing plants vertically integrating the electricity generation process. During the same period California adopted a cap-and-trade program for NOx emissions that resulted in no significant impact on distributed electricity generation in manufacturing. These results suggest that traditional command-and-control approaches to air pollution may exacerbate other market failures such as the energy efficiency gap, because distributed generation is generally recognized as a more energy efficient means of producing electricity
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Environmental Regulation, Abatement, and Productivity: A Frontier Analysis
September 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-51
This research studies the link between environmental regulation and plant level productivity in two U.S. manufacturing industries: pulp and paper mills and oil refineries using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models. Data on abatement spending, emissions and abated emissions are used in different DEA models to study plant productivity outcomes when accounting for abatement spending or emissions regulations. Results indicate that pulp and paper mills and oil refineries in the U.S. suffered decreases in productivity due to pollution abatement activities from 1974 to 2000. These losses in productivity are substantial but have been slowly trending downwards even when the regulations have tended to become more stringent and emission of pollutants has declined suggesting that the best practice has shifted over time. Results also show that the reported abatement expenditures are not able to explain all the losses arising out of regulation suggesting that these abatement expenditures are consistently under-reported.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
REALLOCATION 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
-
Do EPA Regulations Affect Labor Demand? Evidence From the Pulp and Paper Industry
August 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-39
The popular belief is that environmental regulation must reduce employment, since suchregulations are expected to increase production costs, which would raise prices and thus reducedemand for output, at least in a competitive market. Although this effect might seem obvious, a careful microeconomic analysis shows that it is not guaranteed. Even if environmental regulation reduces output in the regulated industry, abating pollution could require additional labor (e.g. to monitor the abatement capital and meet EPA reporting requirements). It is also possible for pollution abatement technologies to be labor enhancing. In this paper we analyze how a particular EPA regulation, the so-called 'Cluster Rule' (CR) imposed on the pulp and paper industry in 2001, affected employment in that sector. Using establishment level data from the Census of Manufacturers and Annual Survey of Manufacturers at the U.S. Census Bureau from 1992-2007 we find evidence of small employment declines (on the order of 3%-7%), which are sometimes statistically significant, at a subset of the plants covered by the CR.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
EVIDENCE OF AN 'ENERGY-MANAGEMENT GAP' IN U.S. MANUFACTURING:
SPILLOVERS FROM FIRM MANAGEMENT PRACTICES TO ENERGY EFFICIENCY
April 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-25
In this paper we merge a well-cited survey of firm management practices into confidential U.S. Census microdata to examine whether generic, i.e. non-energy specific, firm management practices, 'spillover' to enhance energy efficiency in the United States. We find the relationship in U.S. plants to be more nuanced than past research on UK plants has suggested. Most management techniques have beneficial spillovers to energy efficiency, but an emphasis on generic targets, conditional on other management practices, results in spillovers that increase energy intensity. Our specification controls for industry specific effects at a detailed 6-digit NAICS level and shows that this result is stronger for firms in energy intensive industries. We interpret the empirical result that generic management practices do not necessarily spillover to improved energy performance as evidence of an 'energy management gap.'
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Product Quality and Firm Heterogeneity in International Trade
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-08
I develop and implement a methodology for obtaining plant-level estimates of product quality from revenue and physical output data. Intuitively, firms that sell large quantities of output conditional on price are classified as high quality producers. I use this method to decompose cross-plant variation in price and export status into a quality and an efficiency margin. The empirical results show that prices are increasing in quality and decreasing in efficiency. However, selection into exporting is driven mainly by quality. The finding that changes in quality and efficiency have different impact on the firm's export decision is shown to be inconsistent with the traditional iceberg trade cost formulation and points to the importance of per unit transport costs.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Are We Undercounting Reallocation's Contribution to Growth?
January 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-55R
There has been a strong surge in aggregate productivity growth in India since 1990, following
significant economic reforms. Three recent studies have used two distinct methodologies to decompose the sources of growth, and all conclude that it has been driven by within-plant increases in technical efficiency and not between-plant reallocation of inputs. Given the nature of the reforms, where many barriers to input reallocation were removed, this finding has surprised researchers and been dubbed 'India's Mysterious Manufacturing Miracle.' In this paper, we show that the methodologies used may artificially understate the extent of reallocation. One approach, using growth in value added, counts all reallocation growth arising from the movement of intermediate inputs as technical efficiency growth. The second approach, using the Olley-Pakes decomposition, uses estimates of plant-level total factor productivity (TFP) as a proxy for the marginal product of inputs. However, in equilibrium, TFP and the marginal product of inputs are unrelated. Using microdata on manufacturing from five countries ' India, the U.S., Chile, Colombia, and Slovenia ' we show that both approaches significantly understate the true
role of reallocation in economic growth. In particular, reallocation of materials is responsible for over half of aggregate Indian manufacturing productivity growth since 2000, substantially larger than either the contribution of primary inputs or the change in the covariance of productivity and size.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Management in America
January 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-01
The Census Bureau recently conducted a survey of management practices in over 30,000 plants across the US, the first large-scale survey of management in America. Analyzing these data reveals several striking results. First, more structured management practices are tightly linked to better performance: establishments adopting more structured practices for performance monitoring, target setting and incentives enjoy greater productivity and profitability, higher rates of innovation and faster employment growth. Second, there is a substantial dispersion of management practices across the establishments. We find that 18% of establishments have adopted at least 75% of these more structured management practices, while 27% of establishments adopted less than 50% of these. Third, more structured management practices are more likely to be found in establishments that export, who are larger (or are part of bigger firms), and have more educated employees. Establishments in the South and Midwest have more structured practices on average than those in the Northeast and West. Finally, we find adoption of structured management practices has increased between 2005 and 2010 for surviving establishments, particularly for those practices involving data collection and analysis.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Life Cycle of Plants in India and Mexico
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-20
In the U.S., the average 40 year old plant employs almost eight times as many workers as the typical plant five years or younger. In contrast, surviving Indian plants exhibit little growth in terms of either employment or output. Mexico is intermediate to India and the U.S. in these respects: the average 40 year old Mexican plant employs twice as many workers as an average new plant. This pattern holds across many industries and for formal and informal establishments alike. The divergence in plant dynamics suggests lower investments by Indian and Mexican plants in process efficiency, quality, and in accessing markets at home and abroad. In simple GE models, we find that the difference in life cycle dynamics could lower aggregate manufacturing productivity on the order of 25% in India and Mexico relative to the U.S.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Assessing the Incidence and Efficiency of a Prominent Place Based Policy
February 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-07
This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. Using rejected and future applicants to the EZ program as controls, we find that EZ designation substantially increased employment in zone neighborhoods and generated wage increases for local workers without corresponding increases in population or the local cost of living. The results suggest the efficiency costs of first Round EZs were relatively small.
View Full
Paper PDF
