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. We decompose these contributions into plant-level resource reallocations and plant-level technical...

This study analyzes the electric and thermal energy efficiency for five different metal-based durable manufacturing industries in the United States from 1987-2012 at the 3 digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) level. Using confidential plant-level data on energy use and...

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,...

Trademarks (TMs) shape the competitive landscape of markets for goods and services in all countries through branding and conveying information and quality inherent in products. Yet, researchers are largely unable to conduct rigorous empirical analysis of TMs in the modern economy because TM data...

This research studies the link between environmental regulation and plant level productivity in two U.S. manufacturing industries: pulp and paper mills and oil refineries using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models. Data on abatement spending, emissions and abated emissions are used in...

Both the recent literature on production function identification and a considerable body of other empirical work on firm expansion assume a Cobb-Douglas production function. Under this assumption, all technical differences are Hicks neutral. I provide evidence from US manufacturing plants...

Economists (Ollinger and Mueller, 2003; Golan et al., 2004) have considered some of the economic forces, such as demands from major customers, that encourage plants to maintain food safety process control. Other economists, such as Roberts (2005), have identified food safety technologies that enable...

Recent research in international trade emphasizes the importance of firms extensive margins for understanding overall patterns of trade as well as how firms respond to specific events such as trade liberalization. In this paper, we use detailed U.S. trade statistics to provide a broad overview...

International trade models typically assume that producers in one country trade directly with final consumers in another. In reality, of course, trade can involve long chains of potentially independent actors who move goods through wholesale and retail distribution networks. These networks...

Manufacturing in America has become significantly more data-intensive. We investigate the adoption, performance effects and organizational complementarities of data-driven decision making (DDD) in the U.S. Using data collected by the Census Bureau for 2005 and 2010, we observe the extent to...