This paper utilizes data on the personnel policies and economic characteristics of businesses in the manufacturing sector to study the relationship between employee training and labor productivity. The major finding is that businesses that were operating below their expected labor productivity...

Although economic models of training decisions are framed in terms of a company's calculation of the costs and benefits of such training, empirical work has never been able to test this model directly on company behavior. This paper utilizes a unique database to analyze the determinants of the...

This paper explores some costs associated with environmental regulation. We focus on regulation pertaining to ground-level ozone (O3) and its effects on two manufacturing industries -- industrial organic chemicals (SIC 2865-9) and miscellaneous plastic products (SIC 308). Both are major emitters...

This paper provides causal evidence of the impact of industrial policy on firms' long-term performance and quantifies industrial policy's long-term welfare effects. Using a natural experiment and unique historical data during the Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI) Drive in South Korea, we find...

This paper considers the effect of the First World War on large-scale businesses in Second-Industrial-Revolution industries like steel, electricity, and chemicals. For firms in the nations of the Entente, we argue, the war mainly interrupted long-term trends that resumed in the aftermath of the...

The history of innovation in the chemical industry offers many insights for accelerating energy innovation. In this chapter, we begin by laying out the early history of the chemical industry for an overview of the role innovation has played in its development. We then explore three noteworthy...

As the exchange rate, foreign demand, production costs and export promotion policies evolve, manufacturing firms are continually faced with two issues: Whether to be an exporter, and if so, how much to export. We develop a dynamic structural model of export supply that characterizes these two...

DuPont, one of the most respectable U.S. companies, caused environmental damage that ended up costing the company around a billion dollars. By using internal company documents disclosed in trials we rule out the possibilities that this bad outcome was due to ignorance, an unexpected realization,...

This paper studies the influence of the structure of firm R&D, industry R&D spillovers, and plant level physical capital on the factor intensity of production. By the structure of firm R&D we mena its distribution across states and products. By factor intensity we mena the cost shares of...

The effects of market and technological conditions on the investment and markup behavior of firms, and their resulting impacts on economic performance, are closely interrelated and complex. In this paper determinants of and linkages among these are explored for two industries with very different...