An Improved Productivity Decomposition Approach to Understand Firm Dynamics and Aggregate Growth

We propose a new decomposition method for analysing aggregate productivity changes. The main improvement in our proposed method is that we are clearly able to separate out pure productivity changes of a hypothetical average firm from changes in the share of output or value added between firms. Our measure solves an aggregation problem which arises in summing up firm-level contributions to aggregate productivity growth. It also allows for straightforward interpretation of the productivity contribution of entering and exiting firms