We use the World Bank Investment Climate Surveys data to analyze the employment of both labor and capital in Indian manufacturing. We focus on disparities among states in manufacturing employment patterns, and provide reduced form evidence of their relationship to both (i) institutional...

This paper accounts for quality improvements and adjustment costs in all inputs to U.S. manufacturing production. Adjustment processes for non-capital inputs are slower than previously recognized. Annual adjustment percentages are: labor 77, capital 30, energy 20, and materials 21. Factor prices...

Starting in the early 1990s, countries in southern Europe experienced low productivity growth alongside declining real interest rates. We use data for manufacturing firms in Spain between 1999 and 2012 to document a significant increase in the dispersion of the return to capital across firms, a...

This paper uses a new pre-1940 Third World data base documenting real wages and relative factor prices to explore their determinants. There are three possibilities: external price shocks, factor endowment changes, and technological change. As the paper's title suggests, technological change is...

In this paper we discuss recent advances in modeling and estimating dynamic factor demand models, and review the use of such models in analyzing the production structure, the determinants of variable and quasi-fixed factors, and productivity growth. The paper also discusses the traditional...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the industrial demands for structures, equipment, and blue- and white-collar labor. Our approach is consistent with producers holding rational expectations and optimizing dynamically in the presence of adjustment costs, yet it permits generality of...

Income disparity across countries has been large and widening over time. We develop a tractable model where factor requirements in production technology do not necessarily match a country's factor input profile. Appropriate assimilation of frontier technologies balances such multi-dimensional...

Macroeconomic calibrations imply much larger labor supply elasticities than microeconometric studies. One prominent explanation for this divergence is that indivisible labor generates extensive margin responses that are not captured in micro studies of hours choices. We evaluate whether existing...

We study a model of industry dynamics in which idiosyncratic risk is uninsurable and establishments are subject to a financing constraint. We ask: does the model, when parameterized to match salient characteristics of plant-level data (Colombia and South Korea), predict large aggregate TFP...

We develop a theory of outsourcing in which there is market power in one factor market (labor) and no market power in a second factor market (capital). There are two intermediate goods: one labor-intensive and the other capital-intensive. We show there is always outsourcing in the market...