We build up from the plant level an "aggregate(d)" Solow residual by estimating every U.S. manufacturing plant's contribution to the change in aggregate final demand between 1976 and 1996. Our framework uses the Petrin and Levinsohn (2010) definition of aggregate productivity growth, which...

Studies of the firm's demand for factor inputs often assume a constant rate of utilization of the inputs and ignore the fact that the firm can simultaneously choose the level and the rate of utilization of its inputs. In particular, the literature on dynamic factor demand models has, until...

For the first four decades of its existence the U.S. nuclear power industry was run by regulated utilities, with most companies owning only one or two reactors. Beginning in the late 1990s electricity markets in many states were deregulated and almost half of the nation's 103 reactors were sold...

We measure the impact of a drastic new technology for producing steel - the minimill - on the aggregate productivity of U.S. steel producers, using unique plant-level data between 1963 and 2002. We find that the sharp increase in the industry's productivity is linked to this new technology, and...

I provide a quantitative interpretation of financial intermediation in the U.S. over the past 130 years. Measuring separately the cost of intermediation and the production of financial services, I find that: (i) the quantity of intermediation varies a lot over time; (ii) intermediation is...

Within-industry differences in measured plant-level productivity are large. A large literature has been devoted to explaining the causes and consequences of these differences. In the U.S. Census Bureau's manufacturing data, the Bureau imputes for missing values using methods known to result in...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate a model that incorporates the effects of financial decisions on production, profitability, and productivity growth. Asymmetric information generates agency costs of debt and signaling benefits of dividends which then influence production decisions. The...

This paper employs a stochastic frontier approach to examine how climate change and extreme weather affect U.S. agricultural productivity using 1940-1970 historical weather data (mean and variation) as the norm. We have four major findings. First, using temperature humidity index (THI) load and...

The conventional wisdom in health economics is that idiosyncratic features of the healthcare sector leave little scope for market forces to allocate consumers to higher performance producers. However, we find robust evidence across a variety of conditions and performance measures that higher...

A two-sector real business cycle model, estimated with postwar U.S. data, identifies shocks to the levels and growth rates of total factor productivity in distinct consumption- and investment-goods-producing technologies. This model attributes most of the productivity slowdown of the 1970s to...