It is well known that new businesses are typically much smaller than their established industry competitors, and that this size gap closes slowly. We show that even in commodity-like product markets, these patterns do not reflect productivity gaps, but rather differences in demand-side...

A large literature on misallocation and productivity has arisen in recent years, with Hsieh and Klenow (2009; hereafter HK) as its standard empirical framework. The framework's usefulness and theoretical founding make it a valuable starting point for analyzing misallocations. However, we show this...

There is considerable evidence that producer-level churning contributes substantially to aggregate (industry) productivity growth, as more productive businesses displace less productive ones. However, this research has been limited by the fact that producer-level prices are typically unobserved;...

The financial decisions of durable goods makers can impose spillovers on their consumers. Namely, durable goods provide a consumption stream that frequently depends on services provided by the manufacturer (e.g., warranties, parts, and maintenance). Manufacturer bankruptcy, or even the...

This paper examines how sales force impact competition and equilibrium prices in the context of a privatized pension market. We use detailed administrative data on fund manager choices and worker characteristics at the inception of Mexico's privatized social security system, where fund managers...

The economic costs of environmental regulations have been widely debated since the U.S. began to restrict pollution emissions more than four decades ago. Using detailed production data from nearly 1.2 million plant observations drawn from the 1972-1993 Annual Survey of Manufactures, we estimate...

We use broad-based yet detailed data from the economy's goods-producing sectors to investigate firms' ownership of production chains. It does not appear that vertical ownership is primarily used to facilitate transfers of goods along the production chain, as is often presumed: Roughly one-half...

Productivity improvements within establishments (e.g., factories, mines, or retail stores) are an important source of aggregate productivity growth. Past research has documented that learning by doing-productivity improvements that occur in concert with production increases-is one source of such...

General purpose technologies (GPTs) such as AI enable and require significant complementary investments, including co-invention of new processes, products, business models and human capital. These complementary investments are often intangible and poorly measured in the national accounts, even...

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...