Sparked by concerns about their shrinking market share, 14 leading U.S. semiconductor producers, with the financial assistance of the U.S. government in the form of $100 million in annual subsidies, formed a joint R&D consortium -- Sematech -- in 1987. Using Compustat data on all U.S....

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:...

Resource misallocation can lower aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). We use micro data on manufacturing establishments to quantify the extent of this misallocation in China and India compared to the U.S. in recent years. Compared to the U.S., we measure sizable gaps in marginal products...

Employment and hours appear far more cyclical than dictated by the behavior of productivity and consumption. This puzzle has been labeled "the labor wedge" -- a cyclical wedge between the marginal product of labor and the marginal rate of substitution of consumption for leisure. The wedge can be...

In the United States, the average 40-year-old plant employs more than seven times as many workers as the typical plant 5 years or younger. In contrast, surviving plants in India and Mexico exhibit much slower growth, roughly doubling in size over the same age range. The divergence in plant...

Models with sticky prices predict that monetary policy changes will affect relative prices and relative quantities in the short run because some prices are more flexible than others. In U.S. micro data, the degree of price stickiness differs dramatically across consumption categories. This study...

Externalities play a central role in most theories of economic growth. We argue that international externalities, in particular, are essential for explaining a number of empirical regularities about growth and development. Foremost among these is that many countries appear to share a common long...

Externalities play a central role in most theories of economic growth. We argue that international externalities, in particular, are essential for explaining a number of empirical regularities about growth and development. Foremost among these is that many countries appear to share a common long...