The study seeks to explain the attrition rate of new manufacturing plants in the United States in terms of three vectors of variables. The first explains how survival of the fittest proceeds through learning by firms (plants) about their own relative efficiency. The second explains how...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the extent of producer heterogeneity in the output market by analyzing output price and price-marginal cost markups at the plant level for thirteen homogeneous manufactured goods. It relies on micro data from the U.S. Census of Manufactures over the...

The empirical modeling of imperfectly competitive markets has been constrained by the difficulty of obtaining micro data on individual producer prices, outputs, and costs. In this paper we utilize micro data collected from the 1977 Census of Manufactures to study the determinants of plant-level...

The paper examines learning by doing in the context of a production function in which the other arguments are labor, human capital, physical capital, and vintage as a proxy for embodied technical change in physical capital. Learning is further decomposed into organization learning, capital...

The paper presents a dynamic programming model with multiple classes of capital goods to explain capital expenditures on existing plants over their lives. The empirical specification shows that the path of capital expenditures is explained by (a) complementarities between old and new capital...

This paper estimates long-run demand functions for production workers, production worker hours, and nonproduction workers using micro data from U.S. establishment surveys. The paper focuses on estimation of the wage and output elasticities of labor demand using data on over 41,000 U.S....

The paper focuses on the impact of managerial efficiency on output. Three sources of managerial efficiency are identified: (a) superior initial managerial endowments, (b) the accumulation of managerial knowledge and skills through learning and (c) the impact of an effective market for managerial...

A production function is specified with human capital as a separate argument and with embodied technical change proxied by a variable that measures the average vintage of the stock of capital. The coefficients of this production function are estimated with cross section data for roughly 2,150...