We construct a large customer-level database and use it to study electricity pricing patterns from 1963 to 2000. The data show tremendous cross-sectional dispersion in the electricity prices paid by manufacturing plants, reflecting spatial price differences and quantity discounts. Price...

What type of businesses do unions target for organizing and when? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity, and decides which ones to organize and when. An...

We use Hurricane Katrina's damage to the Mississippi coast in 2005 as a natural experiment to study business survival in the aftermath of a cost shock. We find that damaged establishments that returned to operation were more resilient than those that had never been damaged. This effect is...

This paper analyzes how firms decide where to patent in a heterogeneous firm model of trade with endogenous rival entry. In the model, innovating firms compete with rival firms on price, where rivals force the innovating firm to reduce markups and lower the innovating firm's probability of...

This paper develops a model of endogenous product selection within industries by firms. The model is motivated by new evidence we present on the prevalence and importance of product changing activity by U.S. manufacturers. Three-fifths of continuing firms alter their product mix within an...

We use the establishment level data in the Longitudinal Business Database to measure changes in market structure in the U.S. Retail Trade sector during the period, 1976 to 2000. We use firm ownership information to construct measures of firm entry and exit and also to categorize four types of...

This paper examines the frequency, pervasiveness and determinants of product switching by U.S. manufacturing firms. We find that one-half of firms alter their mix of five-digit SIC products every five years, that product switching is correlated with both firm- and firm-product attributes, and...

This paper analyzes the evolution of the distributions of output and employment across firms in U.S. manufacturing industries from 1963 until 1997. The evolutions of the employment and output distributions differ, but display strong inter-industry regularities, including that the nature of the...

When firms make decisions about which product to manufacture at a more disaggregated level than observed in the data, measured firm productivity will reflect both true differences in productivity and non-random decisions about which products to manufacture. This paper examines a model of...

Market structure is determined by the entry and exit decisions of individual producers. These decisions are driven by expectations of future profits which, in turn, depend on the nature of competition within the market. In this paper we estimate a dynamic, structural model of entry and exit in...