Water can be a scarce resource, particularly in certain places at certain times. Understanding both water use and conservation efforts can help ensure that limited supplies can meet the demands of a growing population and economy. This paper examines water use and recirculation in the U.S....

Over the past twenty years, imports to the U.S. from low-wage countries have increased dramatically. In this paper we examine how low-wage country import competition in the U.S. influences the probability of manufacturing establishment closure. Confidential data from the U.S. Bureau of the...

Numerous studies have documented a positive association between information technology (IT) investments and business- and establishment-level productivity, but these studies usually pay sole or disproportionate attention to small- or medium-sized entities. In this paper, we revisit the evidence...

Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near...

It remains an open question whether the impact of environmental regulations differs by the size of the business. Such differences might be expected because of statutory, enforcement, and/or compliance asymmetries. Here, we consider the net effect of these three asymmetries, by estimating the...

Do natural resources benefit producer economies, or is there a "Natural Resource Curse," perhaps as Dutch Disease crowds out manufacturing? We combine new data on oil and gas abundance with Census of Manufactures microdata to estimate how oil and gas booms have affected local economies in the...

Water can be a scarce resource, particularly in certain places at certain times. Understanding both water use and conservation efforts can help ensure that limited supplies can meet the demands of a growing population and economy. This paper examines water use and recirculation in the U.S....

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...

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...

What type of businesses do unions target for organizing and when? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity, and decides which ones to organize and when. An...