Open AccessPosted Content
What Determines Productivity
Chad Syverson,Chad Syverson +1 more
TLDR
The authors surveys and evaluates recent empirical work addressing the question of why businesses differ in their measured productivity levels, and lays out what I see are the major questions that research in the area should address going forward.Abstract:
Economists have shown that large and persistent differences in productivity levels across businesses are ubiquitous. This finding has shaped research agendas in a number of fields, including (but not limited to) macroeconomics, industrial organization, labor, and trade. This paper surveys and evaluates recent empirical work addressing the question of why businesses differ in their measured productivity levels. The causes are manifold, and differ depending on the particular setting. They include elements sourced in production practices--and therefore over which producers have some direct control, at least in theory--as well as from producers' external operating environments. After evaluating the current state of knowledge, I lay out what I see are the major questions that research in the area should address going forward.read more
Citations
More filters
Posted Content
Trade Liberalization and Embedded Institutional Reform: Evidence from Chinese Exporters
TL;DR: The authors examined Chinese textile and clothing exports before and after the removal of externally imposed quotas and found that both the surge in export volumes and the decline in prices after the quota removal are driven by net entry, implying that the pre-liberalization quota allocation is not based on firm productivity.
Journal ArticleDOI
Innovation and Foreign Ownership
Abstract: This paper uses a rich panel dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms (1990-2006) and a propensity score reweighting estimator to show that multinational firms acquire the most productive domestic firms, which, on acquisition, conduct more product and process innovation (simultaneously adopting new machines and organizational practices) and adopt foreign technologies, leading to higher productivity. We propose a model of endogenous selection and innovation in heterogeneous firms that jointly explains the observed selection process and the innovation decisions. Further, we show in the data that innovation on acquisition is associated with the increased market scale provided by the parent firm.
Journal ArticleDOI
How Firms Respond to Business Cycles: the Role of Firm Age and Firm Size
TL;DR: This paper showed that young businesses exhibit very different cyclical dynamics than small/older businesses and that the collapse in housing prices accounts for a significant part of the large decline of young/small businesses in the Great Recession.
Posted Content
Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France
TL;DR: In this paper, size-contingent laws are used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation, and the main losers from the regulation are workers and to a lesser extent large firms.
Posted Content
How Can Micro and Small Enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa Become More Productive? the Impacts of Experimental Basic Managerial Training
TL;DR: In this article, the authors demonstrate that basic-level management training improves business practices and performance, although the extent of improvement varies considerably among entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the vast majority of micro and small enterprises in developing countries are located in industrial clusters.
References
More filters
Posted Content
Estimating Production Functions Using Inputs to Control for Unobservables
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce a new method for conditioning out serially correlated unobserved shocks to the production technology by building ideas first developed in Olley and Pakes (1996), which showed how to use investment to control for correlation between input levels and the unobserved firm-specific productivity process.
ReportDOI
Aggregate Productivity Growth: Lessons from Microeconomic Evidence
TL;DR: The authors examined the relationship between microeconomic productivity dynamics and aggregate productivity growth using establishment-level data for U.S. manufacturing establishments as well for selected service industries and found that the contribution of reallocation of outputs and inputs from less productive to more productive establishments plays a significant role in accounting for aggregate productivity.
Journal ArticleDOI
Misallocation and Manufacturing TFP in China and India
TL;DR: This paper used micro data on manufacturing establishments to quantify the potential extent of misallocation in China and India compared to the U.S. They measured sizable gaps in marginal products of labor and capital across plants within narrowly-defined industries in both countries.
Journal ArticleDOI
Multinational Enterprises, International Trade, and Productivity Growth: Firm-Level Evidence from the United States
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate international technology spillovers to U.S. manufacturing firms via imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) between the years of 1987 and 1996.
Book
Information technology and the American growth resurgence
TL;DR: A study of information technology and economic growth since 1995 that tracks the American growth resurgence to its sources within individual industries is presented in this paper, where the authors identify four IT-producing industries, 17 IT-using industries, and 23 non-IT industries.