Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Annual Survey of Manufactures'
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Viewing papers 11 through 20 of 240
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Working PaperTemperature and Local Industry Concentration
October 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-51
We use plant-level data from the US Census of Manufacturers to study the short and long run effects of temperature on manufacturing activity. We document that temperature shocks significantly increase energy costs and lower the productivity of small manufacturing plants, while large plants are mostly unaffected. In US counties that experienced higher increases in average temperatures between the 1980s and the 2010s, these heterogeneous effects have led to higher concentration of manufacturing activity within large plants, and a reallocation of labor from small to large manufacturing establishments. We offer a preliminary discussion of potential mechanisms explaining why large manufacturing firms might be better equipped for long-run adaptation to climate change, including their ability to hedge across locations, easier access to finance, and higher managerial skills.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperUnionization, Employer Opposition, and Establishment Closure
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-35
We study the effect of private-sector unionization on establishment employment and survival. Specifically, we analyze National Labor Relations Board union elections from 1981'2005 using administrative Census data. Our empirical strategy extends standard difference-in-differences techniques with regression discontinuity extrapolation methods. This allows us to avoid biases from only comparing close elections and to estimate treatment effects that include larger marginof- victory elections. Using this strategy, we show that unionization decreases an establishment's employment and likelihood of survival, particularly in manufacturing and other blue-collar and industrial sectors. We hypothesize that two reasons for these effects are firms' ability to avoid working with new unions and employers' opposition to unions. We find that the negative effects are significantly larger for elections at multi-establishment firms. Additionally, after a successful union election at one establishment, employment increases at the firms' other establishments. Both pieces of evidence are consistent with firms avoiding new unions by shifting production from unionized establishments to other establishments. Finally, we find larger declines in employment and survival following elections where managers or owners were likely more opposed to the union. This evidence supports new reasons for the negative effects of unionization we document.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTechnology Lock-In and Costs of Delayed Climate Policy
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-33
This paper studies the implications of current energy prices for future energy efficiency and climate policy. Using U.S. Census microdata and quasi-experimental variation in energy prices, we first show that manufacturing plants that open when electricity prices are low consume more energy throughout their lifetime, regardless of current electricity prices. We then estimate that a persistent bias of technological change toward energy can explain the long-term effects of entry-year electricity prices on energy intensity. Overall, this 'technology lock-in' implies that increasing entry-year electricity prices by 10% would decrease a plant's energy intensity of production by 3% throughout its lifetime.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperOn The Role of Trademarks: From Micro Evidence to Macro Outcomes
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-16R
What are the effects of trademarks on the U.S. economy? Evidence from comprehensive micro data on trademark registrations and outcomes for U.S. employer firms suggests that trademarks protect firm value and are linked to higher firm growth and marketing activity. Motivated by this evidence, trademarks are introduced in a general equilibrium framework to quantify their aggregate effects. Firms invest in product quality and engage in both informative and persuasive advertising to build a customer base subject to depreciation. Persuasive advertising induces a perception of higher quality. Firms can register trademarks to reduce customer depreciation and enhance product awareness. The model's predictions about trademark registrations, firm growth, and advertising expenditures align with the empirical evidence. The analysis shows that, compared to the counterfactual economy without trademarks, the U.S. economy with trademarks generates higher average product quality but lower variety, ultimately resulting in greater welfare and higher industry concentration. While informative advertising improves welfare, persuasive advertising reduces it. Nevertheless, the positive welfare impact of trademarks outweighs the negative effects of persuasive advertising.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Characteristics and Geographic Distribution of Robot Hubs in U.S. Manufacturing Establishments
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-14
We use data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures to study the characteristics and geography of investments in robots across U.S. manufacturing establishments. We find that robotics adoption and robot intensity (the number of robots per employee) is much more strongly related to establishment size than age. We find that establishments that report having robotics have higher capital expenditures, including higher information technology (IT) capital expenditures. Also, establishments are more likely to have robotics if other establishments in the same Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA) and industry also report having robotics. The distribution of robots is highly skewed across establishments' locations. Some locations, which we call Robot Hubs, have far more robots than one would expect even after accounting for industry and manufacturing employment. We characterize these Robot Hubs along several industry, demographic, and institutional dimensions. The presence of robot integrators and higher levels of union membership are positively correlated with being a Robot Hub.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperManaging Employee Retention Concerns: Evidence from U.S. Census Data
February 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-07
Using Census microdata on 14,000 manufacturing plants, we examine how firms man age employee retention concerns in response to local wage pressure. We validate our measure of employee retention concerns by documenting that plants respond with wage increases, and do so more when the employees' human capital is higher. We doc ument substantial use of non-wage levers in response to retention concerns. Plants shift incentives to increase the likelihood that bonuses can be paid: performance target transparency declines, as does the use of localized performance metrics for bonuses. Furthermore, promotions become more meritocratic, ensuring key employees can be promoted and retained. Lastly, decision-making authority at the plant-level increases, offering more agency to local employees. We find evidence consistent with inequity aversion constraining the response to local wage pressure, and document spillovers in both wage and non-wage reactions across same-firm plants.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperInvestment and Subjective Uncertainty
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-52
A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000 manufacturing plants. We find three key results. First, investment is strongly and robustly negatively associated with higher uncertainty, with a two standard deviation increase in uncertainty associated with about a 6% reduction in investment. Second, uncertainty is also negatively related to employment growth and overall shipments (sales) growth, which highlights the damaging impact of uncertainty on firm growth. Third, flexible inputs like rental capital and temporary workers show a positive relationship to uncertainty, demonstrating that businesses switch from less flexible to more flexible factor inputs at higher levels of uncertainty.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe U.S. Manufacturing Sector's Response to Higher Electricity Prices: Evidence from State-Level Renewable Portfolio Standards
October 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-47
While several papers examine the effects of renewable portfolio standards (RPS) on electricity prices, they mainly rely on state-level data and there has been little research on how RPS policies affect manufacturing activity via their effect on electricity prices. Using plant-level data for the entire U.S. manufacturing sector and all electric utilities from 1992 ' 2015, we jointly estimate the effect of RPS adoption and stringency on plant-level electricity prices and production decisions. To ensure that our results are not sensitive to possible pre-existing differences across manufacturing plants in RPS and non-RPS states, we implement coarsened exact covariate matching. Our results suggest that electricity prices for plants in RPS states averaged about 2% higher than in non-RPS states, notably lower than prior estimates based on state-level data. In response to these higher electricity prices, we estimate that plant electricity usage declined by 1.2% for all plants and 1.8% for energy-intensive plants, broadly consistent with published estimates of the elasticity of electricity demand for industrial users. We find smaller declines in output, employment, and hours worked (relative to the decline in electricity use). Finally, several key RPS policy design features that vary substantially from state-to-state produce heterogeneous effects on plant-level electricity prices.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperOpening the Black Box: Task and Skill Mix and Productivity Dispersion
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-44
An important gap in most empirical studies of establishment-level productivity is the limited information about workers' characteristics and their tasks. Skill-adjusted labor input measures have been shown to be important for aggregate productivity measurement. Moreover, the theoretical literature on differences in production technologies across businesses increasingly emphasizes the task content of production. Our ultimate objective is to open this black box of tasks and skills at the establishment-level by combining establishment-level data on occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with a restricted-access establishment-level productivity dataset created by the BLS-Census Bureau Collaborative Micro-productivity Project. We take a first step toward this objective by exploring the conceptual, specification, and measurement issues to be confronted. We provide suggestive empirical analysis of the relationship between within-industry dispersion in productivity and tasks and skills. We find that within-industry productivity dispersion is strongly positively related to within-industry task/skill dispersion.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperRising Markups or Changing Technology?
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-38R
Recent evidence suggests the U.S. business environment is changing, with rising market concentration and markups. The most prominent and extensive evidence backs out firm-level markups from the first-order conditions for variable factors. The markup is identified as the ratio of the variable factor's output elasticity to its cost share of revenue. Our analysis starts from this indirect approach, but we exploit a long panel of manufacturing establishments to permit output elasticities to vary to a much greater extent - relative to the existing literature - across establishments within the same industry over time. With our more detailed estimates of output elasticities, the measured increase in markups is substantially dampened, if not eliminated, for U.S. manufacturing. As supporting evidence, we relate differences in the markups' patterns to observable changes in technology (e.g., computer investment per worker, capital intensity, diversification to non-manufacturing) and find patterns in support of changing technology as the driver of those differences.View Full Paper PDF
