Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Alfred P Sloan Foundation'
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Viewing papers 91 through 100 of 110
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Working PaperDownsizing, Layoffs and Plant Closure: The Impacts of Import Price Pressure and Technological Growth on U.S. Textile Producers
April 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-10
Downsizing, layoffs and plant closure are three plant-level responses to adverse economic conditions. I provide a theoretical and empirical analysis that illustrates the sources of each phenomenon and the implications for production and employment in the textiles industry. I consider two potential causes of these phenomena: technological progress and increased import competition. I create a micro-founded model of plant-level decision-making and combine it with conditions for dynamic market equilibrium. Through use of detailed plant-level information available in the US Census of Manufacturers and the Annual Survey of Manufacturers for the period 1982-2001, along with price data on imports, I examine the relative contribution of technology and import competition to the decline in output, employment and number of plants in textiles production in the US in recent years. The market-clearing domestic price of textiles is identified as a crucial channel in transmitting technology or import price shocks to downsizing, layoffs and plant closure. The model is estimated on two 4-digit sectors of textiles production (SIC 2211, broadwoven cotton and SIC 2221, broadwoven man-made fiber). The results validate modeling the production sectors as monopolistically competitive, and the elasticity of substitution between foreign and domestic varieties is found to be quite high. The coefficients on the productive technology are sensible, as are the estimated parameters of the plant exit, entry and investment decision rules. In simulations for the broadwoven cotton industry, the effects of technological progress are shown to have a much larger impact on layoffs than on plant closure, with plant size as measured by output actually increasing. Falling foreign prices lead to greater relative magnitudes of plant closure than of downsizing or layoffs.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperImport Price Pressure on Firm Productivity and Employment: The Case of U.S. Textiles
March 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-09
Theoretical research has predicted three different effects of increased import competition on plant-level behavior: reduced domestic production and sales, improving average efficiency of plants, and increased exit of marginal firms. In empirical work, though, such effects are difficult to separate from the impact of exogenous technological progress (or regress). I use detailed plant-level information available in the US Census of Manufacturers and the Annual Survey of Manufacturers for the period 1983-2000 to decompose these effects. I derive the relative contribution of technology and import competition to the increase in productivity and the decline in employment in textiles production in the US in recent years. I then simulate the impact of removal of quota protection on the scale of operation of the average plant and the incentive to plant closure. The methodology employs a number of important innovations in examining the impact of falling import prices on the domestic production of an import-competing good. First, import competition is modeled directly through its impact on the relative prices of monopolistically competitive goods along the lines suggested by Melitz (2000). Second, the effect of technology is incorporated through structural estimation of plant-level production functions in four factors (capital, labor, energy and materials). Solutions to econometric difficulties related to missing capital data and unobserved productivity are incorporated into the estimation technique. The model is estimated for plants with primary product in SIC 2211 (broadwoven cotton cloth). Results validate modeling demand as for differentiated products. Technological coefficients are sensible, with exogenous technological progress playing a large role. In the simulations run, the effects of foreign price competition are orders of magnitude higher than those of technological progress for the period after quotas on imports are removed. The large-scale reduction in employment and output in the US is shown to be a combination of reduced employment and output at plants in continuous operation and of plant closures that exceed new entries.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe LEHD Infrastructure Files and the Creation of the Quarterly Workforce Indicators
January 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-01
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, has built a set of infrastructure files using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their interaction in the U.S. economy. Beginning in 2003 and building on this infrastructure, the Census Bureau has published the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), a new collection of data series that offers unprecedented detail on the local dynamics of labor markets. Despite the fine detail, confidentiality is maintained due to the application of state-of-the-art confidentiality protection methods. This article describes how the input files are compiled and combined to create the infrastructure files. We describe the multiple imputation methods used to impute in missing data and the statistical matching techniques used to combine and edit data when a direct identifier match requires improvement. Both of these innovations are crucial to the success of the final product. Finally, we pay special attention to the details of the confidentiality protection system used to protect the identity and micro data values of the underlying entities used to form the published estimates. We provide a brief description of public-use and restricted-access data files with pointers to further documentation for researchers interested in using these data.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEmployer-Provided Benefit Plans, Workforce Composition and Firm Outcomes
January 2005
Working Paper Number:
tp-2005-01
What do firms gain by offering benefits? Economists have proposed two payoffs: (i) benefits may be a more cost-effective form of compensation than wages for employees facing high marginal tax rates, and (ii) benefits may attract a more stable, skilled workforce. Both should improve firm outcomes, but we have little evidence on this matter. This paper exploits a rich new dataset to examine how firm productivity and survival are related to benefit offering, and finds that benefit-offering firms have higher productivity and higher survival rates. Differences in firm and workforce characteristics explain some but not all of the differences in outcomes.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperNew Approaches to Confidentiality Protection Synthetic Data, Remote Access and Research Data Centers
June 2004
Working Paper Number:
tp-2004-03
View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Relation among Human Capital, Productivity and Market Value: Building Up from Micro Evidence
December 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-14
This paper investigates and evaluates the direct and indirect contribution of human capital to business productivity and shareholder value. The impact of human capital may occur in two ways: the specific knowledge of workers at businesses may directly increase business performance, or a skilled workforce may also indirectly act as a complement to improved technologies, business models or organizational practices. We use newly created firm-level measures of workforce human capital and productivity to examine links between those measures and the market value of the employing firm. The new human capital measures come from an integrated employer-employee data base under development at the US Census Bureau. We link these data to financial information from Compustat at the firm level, which provides measures of market value and tangible assets. The combination of these two sources permits examination of the link between human capital, productivity, and market value. There is a substantial positive relation between human capital and market value that is primarily related to the unmeasured personal characteristics of the employees, which are captured by the new measures.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperDisplaced workers, early leavers, and re-employment wages
November 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-18
In this paper, we lay out a search model that takes explicitly into account the information flow prior to a mass layoff. Using universal wage data files that allow us to identify individuals working with healthy and displacing firms both at the time of displacement as well as any other time period, we test the predictions of the model on re-employment wage differentials. Workers leaving a "distressed" firm have higher re-employment wages than workers who stay with the distressed firm until displacement. This result is robust to the inclusion of controls for worker quality and unobservable firm characteristics.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAgent Heterogeneity and Learning: An Application to Labor Markets
October 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-20
I develop a matching model with heterogeneous workers, rms, and worker-firm matches, and apply it to longitudinal linked data on employers and employees. Workers vary in their marginal product when employed and their value of leisure when unemployed. Firms vary in their marginal product and cost of maintaining a vacancy. The marginal product of a worker-firm match also depends on a match-specific interaction between worker and rm that I call match quality. Agents have complete information about worker and rm heterogeneity, and symmetric but incomplete information about match quality. They learn its value slowly by observing production outcomes. There are two key results. First, under a Nash bargain, the equilibrium wage is linear in a person-specific component, a firm-specific component, and the posterior mean of beliefs about match quality. Second, in each period the separation decision depends only on the posterior mean of beliefs and person and rm characteristics. These results have several implications for an empirical model of earnings with person and rm e ects. The rst implies that residuals within a worker-firm match are a martingale; the second implies the distribution of earnings is truncated. I test predictions from the matching model using data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the US Census Bureau. I present both xed and mixed model specifications of the equilibrium wage function, taking account of structural aspects implied by the learning process. In the most general specification, earnings residuals have a completely unstructured covariance within a worker-firm match. I estimate and test a variety of more parsimonious error structures, including the martingale structure implied by the learning process. I nd considerable support for the matching model in these data.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Sensitivity of Economic Statistics to Coding Errors in Personal Identifiers
October 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-17
In this paper, we describe the sensitivity of small-cell flow statistics to coding errors in the identity of the underlying entities. Specifically, we present results based on a comparison of the U.S. Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) before and after correcting for such errors in SSN-based identifiers in the underlying individual wage records. The correction used involves a novel application of existing statistical matching techniques. It is found that even a very conservative correction procedure has a sizable impact on the statistics. The average bias ranges from 0.25 percent up to 15 percent for flow statistics, and up to 5 percent for payroll aggregates.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEstimating Measurement Error in SIPP Annual Job Earnings: A Comparison of Census Survey and SSA Administrative Data
September 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-24
The third chapter investigates measurement error in SIPP annual job earnings data linked to SSA administrative earnings data. The multiple earnings measures provided by the survey and administrative data enable the identification of components of true variation and variation due to measurement error. We find that 18% of the variation in SIPP annual job earnings can be attributed to measurement error. We also find that in both the SIPP and the DER, measurement error is persistent over time. A lower level of auto-correlation in the SIPP measurement error than in the economic error component leads to a lower reliability ratio of .62 for first-differenced earnings.View Full Paper PDF
