When a production process requires two extremely complementary inputs, conventional wisdom holds that a firm would always upgrade them simultaneously. We show, however, that if upgrading each input involves a fixed cost, the firm may upgrade them at different dates, "asynchronously." This...

Economies at early stages of development are frequently shaken by large changes in growth rates, whereas advanced economies tend to experience relatively stable growth rates. To explain this pattern, we propose a model of technological diversification. Production makes use of input-varieties...

We measure the impact of a drastic new technology for producing steel--the minimill--on industry-wide productivity in the US steel industry, using unique plant-level data between 1963 and 2002. The sharp increase in the industry's productivity is linked to this new technology through two...

A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the United States over the past 130 years yields the following results: (i) the finance industry's share of gross domestic product (GDP) is high in the 1920s, low in the 1960s, and high again after 1980; (ii) most of these variations can be...

We investigate the nature of selection and productivity growth in industries where we observe producer-level quantities and prices separately. We show there are important differences between revenue and physical productivity. Because physical productivity is inversely correlated with price while...

This paper investigates the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. Exploiting harmonized firm‑level data for a number of countries, we show that there is substantial and systematic cross‑country variation in the within-industry covariance...

This paper uses a rich panel dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms (1990-2006) and a propensity score reweighting estimator to show that multinational firms acquire the most productive domestic firms, which, on acquisition, conduct more product and process innovation (simultaneously adopting...