Lafortune, Jeanne; Lewis, Ethan; Martinez, Jose Pablo; … - National Bureau of Economic Research - 2021
This paper estimates returns to scale for manufacturing industries around the turn of the twentieth century in the … United States by exploiting an industry-city panel data for the years 1880-1930. We estimate decreasing returns to scale on … returns to scale from "agglomeration" effects. We also find that returns to scale grew substantially after 1910, mostly …