There is wide variation in the sizes of manufacturing plants, even within the most narrowly defined industry classifications used by statistical agencies. Standard theories attribute all such size differences to productivity differences. This paper develops an alternative theory in which...

Big cities specialize in services rather than manufacturing. Big-city establishments in services are larger than the national average while those in manufacturing are smaller. This paper proposes an explanation of these and other facts. The theory is developed in an economic geography model that...

Does national market size matter for industrial structure? Round One (Krugman) answered in the affirmative: Home market effects matter. Round Two (Davis) refuted this, arguing that an assumption of convenience--transport costs only for the differentiated goods--conveniently obtained the result....

The fact that large manufacturing plants export relatively more than small plants has been at the foundation of much work in the international trade literature. We examine this fact using Census microdata on plant shipments from the Commodity Flow Survey. We show that the fact is not entirely an...

Roberts and Supina (1996) show that for a few selected industries in which unit values can be obtained using the product data from the Census of Manufactures, larger plants have lower price just like we report. An important benefit of using the CFS microdata is that we are able to conduct an...

There is wide variation in the sizes of manufacturing plants, even within the most narrowly defined industry classifications. Standard theories attribute such size differences to productivity differences. This paper develops an alternative theory in which industries are made up of large plants...

There is wide variation in the sizes of manufacturing plants, even within the most narrowly defined industry classifications used by statistical agencies. Standard theories attribute all such size differences to productivity differences. This paper develops an alternative theory in which...

The fact that large manufacturing plants export relatively more than small plants has been at the foundation of much work in the international trade literature. We examine this fact using Census micro data on plant shipments from the Commodity Flow Survey. We show the fact is not entirely an...

There is wide variation in the sizes of manufacturing plants, even within the most narrowly defined industry classifications used by statistical agencies. Standard theories attribute all such size differences to productivity differences. This paper develops an alternative theory in which...