Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Census of Services'
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Authors
Thomas Hubbard - 3
Luis Garicano - 3
Viewing papers 11 through 15 of 15
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Working PaperThe Impact of Minimum Quality Standards on Firm Entry, Exit and Product Quality: The Case of the Child Care Market
December 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-28
We examine the impact of minimum quality standards on the supply side of the child care market, using a unique panel data set merged from the Census of Services Industries, state regulation data, and administrative accreditation records from the National Association of Education for Young Children. We control for state-specific and time-specific fixed effects in order to mitigate the biases associated with policy endogeneity. We find that the effects of quality standards specifying the labor intensiveness of child care services are strikingly different from those specifying staff qualifications. Higher staff-child ratio requirements deter entry and reduce the number of operating child care establishments. This entry barrier appears to select establishments with better quality into the market and alleviates competition among existing establishments: existing establishments are more likely to receive accreditation and higher profits, and are less likely to exit. By contrast, higher staff-education requirements do not have entry-deterrence effects. They do have the unintended effects of discouraging accreditation, reducing owners' profits, and driving firms out of businesses.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperHierarchies, Specialization, and the Utilization of Knowledge: Theory and Evidence from the Legal Services Industry
May 2004
Working Paper Number:
CES-04-07
What role do hierarchies play with respect to the organization of production and what determines their structure? We develop an equilibrium model of hierarchical organization, then provide empirical evidence using confidential data on thousands of law offices from the 1992 Census of Services. The driving force in the model is increasing returns in the utilization of acquired knowledge. We show how the equilibrium assignment of individuals to hierarchical positions varies with the degree to which their human capital is field-specialized, then show how this equilibrium changes with the extent of the market. We find empirical evidence consistent with a central proposition of the model: the share of lawyers that work in hierarchies and the ratio of associates to partners increases as market size increases and lawyers field-specialize. Other results provide evidence against alternative interpretations that emphasize unobserved differences in the distribution of demand or 'firm size effects,' and lend additional support to the view that a role hierarchies play in legal services is to help exploit increasing returns associated with the utilization of human capital.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSpecialization, Firms, and Markets: The Division of Labor Within and Between Law Firms
May 2003
Working Paper Number:
CES-03-13
What is the role of firms and markets in mediating the division of labor? This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine law firms' boundaries. We find that firms' field scope narrows as market size increases and individuals specialize, indicating that firms' boundaries reflect organizational trade-offs. Moreover, we find that whether the division of labor is mediated by firms differs systematically according to whether lawyers in a particular field are mainly involved in structuring transactions or in dispute resolution. Our evidence is consistent with hypotheses in which firms' boundaries reflect variation in the value of knowledge-sharing or in the costs of monitoring, but not in risk-sharing. Our findings show how the incentive trade-offs associated with exploiting increasing returns from specialization help lead the structure of the industry to be fragmented, but highly-skewed.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCivic Community in Small-Town America: How Civic Welfare is Influenced by Local Capitalism and Civic Engagement
December 2001
Working Paper Number:
CES-01-19
The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to gain a fuller understanding of factors that foster community cohesion and contribute to the residents' social and economic well-being; and, second, to move beyond previous research that used larger spatial units such as states, counties, or aggregates of counties and to focus instead on American small towns (population 2,500-20,000). The data on small towns are drawn from public-use files and from confidential microdata from various economic censuses. From these sources we construct measures of locally oriented firms, self-employment, business establishments that serve as gathering places, and associations. The local capitalism and civic engagement variables generally perform as hypothesized; in some cases they are related quite strongly to civic welfare outcomes such as income levels, poverty rates, and nonmigration rates. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of working with place-level data and suggest some strategies for subsequent work on small towns and other incorporated places.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAggregate Productivity Growth: Lessons From Microeconomic Evidence
September 1998
Working Paper Number:
CES-98-12
In this study we focus on the role of the reallocation of activity across individual producers for aggregate productivity growth. A growing body of empirical analysis yields striking patterns in the behavior of establishment-level reallocation and productivity. Nevertheless, a review of existing studies yields a wide range of findings regarding the contribution of reallocation to aggregate productivity growth. Through our review of existing studies and our own sensitivity analysis, we find that reallocation plays a significant role in the changes in productivity growth at the industry level and that the impact of net entry is disproportionate since entering plants tend to displace less productive exiting plants, even after controlling for overall average growth in productivity. However, an important conclusion of our sensitivity analysis is that the quantitative contribution of reallocation to the aggregate change in productivity is sensitive to the decomposition methodology employed. Our findings also confirm and extend others in the literature that indicate that both learning and selection effects are important in this context. A novel aspect of our analysis is that we have examined the role of reallocation for aggregate productivity growth to a selected set of service sector industries. Our analysis considers the 4-digit industries that form the 3-digit industry automobile repair shops. We found tremendous churning in this industry with extremely large rates of entry and exit. Moreover, we found that productivity growth in the industry is dominated establishment data at Census, the results are quite striking and clearly call for further analysis.View Full Paper PDF
