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...

We examine the within- and across-firm shipment decisions of tens of thousands of goods-producing and distributing establishments. This allows us to quantify the normally unobservable forces that determine firm boundaries; which transactions are mediated by ownership control, as opposed to...

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

We present several empirical facts about trends in marketing investment in the US. We also present estimates of the private value of brands to firms and aggregate intangible brand capital stocks created by these investments. These investments include the creation and maintenance of a brand name...

Across many sectors, research has established that management explains a notable portion of productivity differences across organizations. A remaining question, however, is whether it is managers themselves or firm-wide management practices that matter. We shed light on this question by...

A large body of work has highlighted the importance of employment reallocation as a driver of aggregate productivity growth, but there is little direct evidence on the extent and nature of this process at the worker-firm level. We use an administrative matched employer-employee census for Chile...

We explore how firms grow by adding products. In contrast to most earlier work on the topic, our conceptual and empirical framework allows for separate treatment of product innovation (vertical differentiation) and diversification (horizontal differentiation). The market context is Japan's...

This paper tests for and measures monopsony power in the U.S. higher education labor market. It does so by directly estimating the residual labor supply curves facing individual four-year colleges and universities using school-specific labor demand instruments. The results indicate that schools...

There is an ongoing merger wave in the US hospital industry, but it remains an open question how hospital mergers change, or fail to change, hospital behavior, performance, and outcomes. In this research, we open the “black box” of practices within hospitals in the context of a mega-merger...

Aggregate data show a large and decades-long decline in construction sector productivity. This decline in such a large sector has had a material effect on secular productivity growth for the economy as a whole. Prior work has focused on the role of potential measurement problems in construction,...