This paper presents a quantitative model of productivity dispersion to explain why inefficient producers are slowly selected out of the ready-mix concrete industry. Measured productivity dispersion between the 10th and 90th percentile falls from a 4 to 1 difference using OLS, to a 2 to 1...

Most capital in the United States is idle much of the time. By some measures, the average workweek of capital in U.S. manufacturing is as low as 55 hours per 168 hour week. The level and variability of capital utilization has important implications for understanding both the level of production...

This paper investigates how takeovers create value. Using plant-level data, I show that acquirers increase targets' productivity through more efficient use of capital and labor. Acquirers significantly reduce capital expenditures, wages, and employment in target plants, though output is...

We develop a method for identifying departures from relative factor price equality that is robust to unobserved variation in factor productivity. We implement this method using data on the relative wage bills of non-production and production workers across 170 local labor markets comprising the...

In the U.S., the average 40 year old plant employs almost eight times as many workers as the typical plant five years or younger. In contrast, surviving Indian plants exhibit little growth in terms of either employment or output. Mexico is intermediate to India and the U.S. in these respects:...

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 paper empirically investigates the possible market power effects of vertical integration proposed in the theoretical literature on vertical foreclosure. It uses a rich data set of cement and ready-mixed concrete plants that spans several decades to perform a detailed case study. There is...

We exploit a rich new database on Prices and Quantities of Electricity in Manufacturing (PQEM) to study electricity productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector. The database contains nearly 2 million customer-level observations (i.e., manufacturing plants) from 1963 to 2000. It allows us to...

This paper provides new evidence that estimates based on aggregate data will understate the true procyclicality of total factor productivity. I examine plant-level data and show that some industries experience countercyclical reallocations of output shares among firms at different points in the...