Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Annual Survey of Manufactures'
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Viewing papers 51 through 60 of 242
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Working PaperStrong Employers and Weak Employees: How Does Employer Concentration Affect Wages?
April 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-15
We analyze the effect of local-level labor market concentration on wages. Using plant-level U.S. Census data over the period 1977'2009, we find that: (1) local-level employer concentration exhibits substantial cross-sectional and time-series variation and increases over time; (2) consistent with labor market monopsony power, there is a negative relation between local-level employer concentration and wages that is more pronounced at high levels of concentration and increases over time; (3) the negative relation between labor market concentration and wages is stronger when unionization rates are low; (4) the link between productivity growth and wage growth is stronger when labor markets are less concentrated; and (5) exposure to greater import competition from China (the 'China Shock') is associated with more concentrated labor markets. These five results emphasize the role of local-level labor market monopsonies in influencing firm wage-setting.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperUpstream, Downstream: Diffusion and Impacts of the Universal Product Code
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-66R
We study the adoption, diffusion, and impacts of the Universal Product Code (UPC) between 1975 and 1992, during the initial years of the barcode system. We find evidence of network effects in the diffusion process. Matched-sample difference-in-difference estimates show that firm size and trademark registrations increase following UPC adoption by manufacturers. Industry-level import penetration also increases with domestic UPC adoption. Our findings suggest that barcodes, scanning, and related technologies helped stimulate variety-enhancing product innovation and encourage the growth of international retail supply chains.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperPirate's Treasure
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-51
Do countries that improve their protection of intellectual property rights gain access to new product varieties from technologically advanced countries? We build the first comprehensive matched firm level data set on exports and patents using confidential microdata from the US Census to address this question. Across several different estimation approaches we find evidence that these protections affect where US firms export.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperMacro and Micro Dynamics of Productivity: From Devilish Details to Insights
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-41R
Researchers use a variety of methods to estimate total factor productivity (TFP) at the firm level and, while these may seem broadly equivalent, how the resulting measures relate to the TFP concept in theoretical models depends on the assumptions about the environment in which firms operate. Interpreting these measures and drawing insights based upon their characteristics thus must take into account these conceptual differences. Absent data on prices and quantities, most methods yield 'revenue productivity' measures. We focus on two broad classes of revenue productivity measures in our examination of the relationship between measured and conceptual TFP (TFPQ). The first measure has been increasingly used as a measure of idiosyncratic distortions and to assess the degree of misallocation. The second measure is, under standard assumptions, a function of funda- mentals (e.g., TFPQ). Using plant-level U.S. manufacturing data, we find these alternative measures are (i) highly correlated; (ii) exhibit similar dispersion; and (iii) have similar relationships with growth and survival. These findings raise questions about interpreting the first measure as a measure of idiosyncratic distortions. We also explore the sensitivity of estimates of the contribution of reallocation to aggregate productivity growth to these alternative approaches. We use recently developed structural decompositions of aggregate productivity growth that depend critically on estimates of output versus revenue elasticities. We find alternative approaches all yield a significant contribution of reallocation to productivity growth (although the quantitative contribution varies across approaches).View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCreditor Rights, Technology Adoption, and Productivity: Plant-Level Evidence
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-36
I analyze the impact of strengthening of creditor rights on productivity using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Following the adoption of anti-recharacterization laws that improve the ability of lenders to access the collateral of the firm, total factor productivity of treated plants increases by 2.6 percent. This effect is mainly observed among plants belonging to financially constrained firms. Furthermore, treated plants invest in capital of younger vintage and newer technology, and become more capital-intensive. My results suggest that strengthening of creditor rights leads to a relaxation in borrowing constraints, and helps firms adopt a more efficient production technology.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWhat Drives Differences in Management?
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-32
Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of 'structured' management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for about a fifth of the spread of productivity, a similar fraction as that accounted for by R&D and twice as much as explained by IT. We find evidence for four 'drivers' of management: competition, business environment, learning spillovers and human capital. Collectively, these drivers account for about a third of the dispersion of structured management practices.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAn Empirical Analysis of Capacity Costs
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-26
A central premise of management accounting is that including the cost of unused capacity in product costs can distort these costs and misguide users. Yet, there is little large-scale empirical evidence on the materiality of the cost of unused capacity. This study uses a confidential Census sample of 151,900 U.S. manufacturing plants from 1974-2011 to investigate the impact of separating the cost of unused capacity. We find that excluding the cost of unused capacity increases operating profit margins by approximately 26 percent. This order of magnitude is economically significant, and is pervasive across industries and over time. In additional analyses, we find that separating the cost of unused capacity largely smooths the time-series variation in unitized product costs and profit margins. Our finding of higher mean and lower variation of adjusted margins should be of considerable interest to both investors and managers.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAre firm-level idiosyncratic shocks important for U.S. aggregate volatility?
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-23
This paper quantitatively assesses whether firm-specific shocks can drive the U.S. business cycle. Firm-specific shocks to the largest firms can directly contribute to aggregate fluctuations whenever the firm size distribution is fat-tailed giving rise to the granular hypothesis. I use a novel, comprehensive data set compiled from administrative sources that contains the universe of firms and trade transactions, and find that the granular hypothesis accounts at most for 16 percent of the variation in aggregate sales growth. This is about half of that found by previous studies that imposed Gibrat's law where all firms are equally volatile regardless of their size. Using the full distribution of growth rates among U.S. firms, I find robust evidence of a negative relationship between firm-level volatility and size, i.e. the size-variance relationship. The largest firms (whose shocks drive granularity) are the least volatile under the size-variance relationship, thus their influence on aggregates is mitigated. I show that by taking this relationship into account the effect of firm-specific shocks on observed macroeconomic volatility is substantially reduced. I then investigate several plausible mechanisms that could explain the negative sizevariance relationship. After empirically ruling out some of them, I suggest a 'market power' channel in which large firms face smaller price elasticities and therefore respond less to a givensized productivity shock than small firms do. I provide direct evidence for this mechanism by estimating demand elasticities among U.S. manufactures. Lastly, I construct an analytically tractable framework that is consistent with several empirical regularities related to firm size.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperMultinationals Offshoring, and the Decline of U.S. Manufacturing
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-22
We provide three new stylized facts that characterize the role of multinationals in the U.S. manufacturing employment decline, using a novel microdata panel from 1993-2011 that augments U.S. Census data with firm ownership information and transaction-level trade. First, over this period, U.S. multinationals accounted for 41% of the aggregate manufacturing decline, disproportionate to their employment share in the sector. Second, U.S. multinational-owned establishments had lower employment growth rates than a narrowly-defined control group. Third, establishments that became part of a multinational experienced job losses, accompanied by increased foreign sourcing of intermediates by the parent firm. To establish whether imported intermediates are substitutes or complements for U.S. employment, we develop a model of input sourcing and show that the employment impact of foreign sourcing depends on a key elasticity of firm size to production efficiency. Structural estimation of this elasticity finds that imported intermediates substitute for U.S. employment. In general equilibrium, our estimates imply a sizable manufacturing employment decline of 13%.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSlow to Hire, Quick to Fire: Employment Dynamics with Asymmetric Responses to News
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-15
Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a united explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro and micro data. In particular, they generate countercyclical movement in both aggregate conditional 'macro' volatility and cross-sectional 'micro' volatility as well as negative skewness in the cross section and in the time series at different level of aggregation. Concave establishment level responses of employment growth to TFP shocks estimated from Census data induce significant skewness, movements in volatility and amplification of bad aggregate shocks.View Full Paper PDF
