Plant-level data from U.S. textile industries indicate (1) significant cross-sectional dispersion in plant-level productivity within narrowly defined industries, (2) that highly productive plants grow faster and are less likely to exit, (3) dispersion in productivity is larger in industries with...

A vintage capital model where the firm makes decisions about whether to replace or upgrade its old capital stock with new capital is developed in this paper. The model is used to study how technological characteristics of capital affect investment behavior. In particular, it is asked how the...

A common result from altering several fundamental assumptions of the neoclassical investment model with convex adjustment costs is that investment may occur in lumpy episodes. This paper takes a step back and asks "How lumpy is investment?" We answer this question by documenting the...

Building on evidence that (a) productivity growth from learning by doing diminishes as experience accumulates with a technology and (b) learning by doing is largely specific to each production technology, this paper models a firm's decision of when to update its technology. The model implies...

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...