Recent high rates of takeover activity have stimulated considerable interest and concern among policymakers and the public about changes in corporate ownership, but relatively little evidence about the "read" (as opposed to financial) effects of takeovers has been available. This paper presents...

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...

Previous studies have demonstrated that productivity growth is positively correlated with the intensity of R&D investment. However, existing studies of this relationship at the micro (firm or line of business) level have been subject to some important limitations. The most serious of these has...

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...

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...