Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'production'
The following papers contain search terms that you selected. From the papers listed below, you can navigate to the PDF, the profile page for that working paper, or see all the working papers written by an author. You can also explore tags, keywords, and authors that occur frequently within these papers.
See Working Papers by Tag(s), Keywords(s), Author(s), or Search Text
Click here to search again
Frequently Occurring Concepts within this Search
Authors
Sang V Nguyen - 17
John Haltiwanger - 16
Lucia Foster - 16
Andrew Bernard - 13
J. Bradford Jensen - 11
Viewing papers 81 through 90 of 246
-
Working PaperDo Environmental Regulations Disproportionately Affect Small Businesses? Evidence from the Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures Survey
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-25R
It remains an open question whether the impact of environmental regulations differs by the size of the business. Such differences might be expected because of statutory, enforcement, and/or compliance asymmetries. Here, we consider the net effect of these three asymmetries, by estimating the relationship between plant size and pollution abatement expenditures, using establishment-level data on U.S. manufacturers from the Census Bureau's Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures (PACE) surveys of 1974-1982, 1984-1986, 1988-1994, 1999, and 2005, combined with data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures and Census of Manufactures. We model establishments' PAOC intensity - that is, their pollution abatement operating costs per unit of economic activity - as a function of establishment size, industry, and year. Our results show that PAOC intensity increases with establishment size. We also find that larger firms spend more per unit of output than do smaller firms.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe 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
-
Working PaperEvaluating the Impact of MEP Services on Establishment Performance: A Preliminary Empirical Investigation
July 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-15
This work examines the impact of manufacturing extension services on establishment productivity. It builds on an earlier study conducted by Jarmin in the 1990s, by matching the Census of Manufacturers (CMF) with the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) customer and activity datasets to generate treatment and comparison groups for analysis. The scope of the study is the period 1997 to 2002, which was a period of economic downturn in the manufacturing sector and budgetary challenges for the MEP. The paper presents some preliminary findings from this analysis. Both lagged dependent variable (LDV) and difference in difference (DiD) models are employed to estimate the relationship between manufacturing extension and labor productivity. The results presented are inconclusive and paint a mixed picture as they demonstrate the benefits and limitations of using Census microdata in program evaluation. They also point to the need to conduct analyses that could help to better understand the dynamic impact of MEP services.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMaterials 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.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Slow Growth of New Plants: Learning about Demand?
March 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-06
It is well known that new businesses are typically much smaller than their established industry competitors, and that this size gap closes slowly. We show that even in commodity-like product markets, these patterns do not reflect productivity gaps, but rather differences in demand-side fundamentals. We document and explore patterns in plants' idiosyncratic demand levels by estimating a dynamic model of plant expansion in the presence of a demand accumulation process (e.g., building a customer base). We find active accumulation driven by plants' past production decisions quantitatively dominates passive demand accumulation, and that within-firm spillovers affect demand levels but not growth.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMicro Data and the Macro Elasticity of Substitution
March 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-05
We estimate the aggregate elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the US manufacturing sector. We show that the aggregate elasticity of substitution can be expressed as a simple function of plant level structural parameters and sufficient statistics of the distribution of plant input cost shares. We then use plant level data from the Census of Manufactures to construct a local elasticity of substitution at various levels of aggregation. Our approach does not assume the existence of a stable aggregate production function, as we build up our estimate from the cross section of plants at a point in time. Accounting for substitution within and across plants, we find that the aggregate elasticity is substantially below unity at approximately 0.7. Lastly we assess the sources of the bias of aggregate technical change from 1987 to 1997. We find that the labor augmenting character of aggregate technical change is due almost exclusively to labor augmenting productivity growth at the plant level rather than relative growth in capital intensive plants.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Spatial Extent of Agglomeration Economies: Evidence from Three U.S. Manufacturing Industries
January 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-01
The spatial extent of localized agglomeration economies constitutes one of the central current questions in regional science. It is crucial for understanding firm location decisions and for assessing the influence of proximity in shaping spatial patterns of economic activity, yet clear-cut answers are difficult to come by. Theoretical work often fails to define or specify the spatial dimension of agglomeration phenomena. Existing empirical evidence is far from consistent. Most sources of data on economic performance do not supply micro-level information containing usable geographic locations. This paper provides evidence of the distances across which distinct sources of agglomeration economies generate benefits for plants belonging to three manufacturing industries in the United States. Confidential data from the Longitudinal Research Database of the United States Census Bureau are used to estimate cross-sectional production function systems at the establishment level for three contrasting industries in three different years. Along with relevant establishment, industry, and regional characteristics, the production functions include variables that indicate the local availability of potential labor and supply pools and knowledge spillovers. Information on individual plant locations at the county scale permits spatial differentiation of the agglomeration variables within geographic regions. Multiple distance decay profiles are investigated in order to explore how modifying the operationalization of proximity affects indicated patterns of agglomeration externalities and interfirm interactions. The results imply that industry characteristics are at least as important as the type of externality mechanism in determining the spatial pattern of agglomeration benefits. The research methods borrow from earlier work by the author that examines the relationships between regional industrial structure and manufacturing production.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperExport Prices of U.S. Firms
December 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-42
Using confidential firm-level data from the United States in 2002, we show that exporting firms charge prices for narrowly defined goods that differ substantially with the characteristics of firms and export markets. We control for selection into export markets using a three-stage estimator. We have three main results. First, we find that that highly productive and skill intensive firms charge higher prices, while capital-intensive firms charge lower prices. Second, the very large correlation between distance and export prices found by Baldwin and Harrigan (2011) is largely due to a composition effect. Third, U.S. firms charge slightly higher prices to larger and richer markets, and substantially higher prices to markets other than Canada and Mexico.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperNewly Recovered Microdata on U.S. Manufacturing Plants from the 1950s and 1960s: Some Early Glimpses
September 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-29
Longitudinally-linked microdata on U.S. manufacturing plants are currently available to researchers for 1963, 1967, and 1972-2009. In this paper, we provide a first look at recently recovered manufacturing microdata files from the 1950s and 1960s. We describe their origins and background, discuss their contents, and begin to explore their sample coverage. We also begin to examine whether the available establishment identifier(s) allow record linking. Our preliminary analyses suggest that longitudinally-linked Annual Survey of Manufactures microdata from the mid-1950s through the present ' containing 16 years of additional data ' appears possible though challenging. While a great deal of work remains, we see tremendous value in extending the manufacturing microdata series back into time. With these data, new lines of research become possible and many others can be revisited.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperNature Versus Nurture in the Origins of Highly Productive Businesses: An Exploratory Analysis of U.S. Manufacturing Establishments
September 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-26
This paper investigates the origins of productivity leaders, those that operate close to and help push out the production frontier. Do such businesses emerge as top performers from the very beginning of their lives, for example as the consequence of an outstanding founding idea, technology, or location? Or, at the other extreme, do they appear initially as completely average (or even underperformers) that exhibit gradual improvement as they learn and develop with age? To answer this question we draw upon five decades of U.S. Census of Manufacturing (CM) establishment-level data, tracing the productivity leaders of the most recent CM (2007) back over their observed life spans. We also examine possible industry-level correlates of variation in the extent of nature versus nurture that are suggested by theories of industry dynamics and economic growth.View Full Paper PDF
