This study uses a confidential Census sample of 151,900 U.S. manufacturing plant-years from 1974-2011 to investigate the impact of excluding the costs of unused capacity from key financial indicators, namely product costs and gross margins. We estimate the magnitude of unused capacity cost as a...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>This paper shows that major components of modern manufacturing processes, such as inventory management and cross-training, play a significant control role. In our model, workers possess information that is critical to efficient ongoing operations. An organizational design that motivates...