This paper documents that standard cross-sectional determinants of firm leverage also apply to the capital structure of large banks in the United States and Europe. We find a remarkable consistency in sign, significance and economic magnitude. Like non-financial firms, banks appear to have...

The size distribution and growth rates dynamics of U.S. manufacturing firms have been extensively studied by many authors. In this paper, using the COMPUSTAT database, we extend the analysis to disaggregated data, studying 15 industrial sectors. We find that among the stylized facts presented in...

In this paper, we study the growth rates of 4-digit sectors in U.S. manufacturing. Two measures of size (value of shipments, value added) are considered, for each of the 38 years (1959-1996) of a sample of 458 4-digit sectors, drawn from the NBER Manufacturing Productivity database. Whole sample...

In the paper, productivity convergence is analyzed with a broad panel of industry sector data for the United States and Germany for 1960-1990. The time-series/cross-sectoral data set allows to investigate country-specific convergence, and to control for sector-specific differences in human...

Empirical factor demand analysis typically involves making a choice from among several competing non-nested functional forms. Each of the commonly used factor demand systems, such as Translog, Generalized Leontief, Quadratic, and Generalized McFadden, can provide a valid and useful empirical...

An increasingly influential technological-discontinuity paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some limited...