This research, identifies lean management practices and elements. Despite widespread interest and little empirical evidence to support its position in improving organization performance, there is little understanding of lean business strategy key organizational factors. This research identifies...

A stochastic frontier approach is used to examine efficiency of the U.S. manufacturing sector over the 1958 – 1996 time period. A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) panel data set was used to estimate a translog cost frontier. Both fixed effects and random effects models were...

This article presents the results of a survey of Bulgarian industrial organizations with respect to their clashes with the world financial and economic crisis’s effects on local economy. The crisis manifestations under business environment specificity factors and important cultural aspects of...

The conventional antitrust wisdom is that the formation of patent pools is welfare en- hancing when patents are complementary, since the pool avoids a double-marginalization problem associated with independent licensing. The focus of this paper is on (down- stream) product development and...

Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near...

We build up from the plant level an aggregate(d) Solow residual by estimating every U.S. manufacturing plant's contribution to the change in aggregate final demand between 1976 and 1996. Our framework uses the Petrin and Levinsohn (2010) definition of aggregate productivity growth, which...

This paper offers a new approach to the definition of manufacturing activities, placing them in a broader framework to capture the dynamics of manufacturing in the economy. After discussing why in many cases it may bc appropriate to consider producer services and tnanttfacturing industries...

This paper examines the relationship between the use of advanced technologies and productivity and productivity growth rates. We use data from the 1993 and 1988 Survey of Manufacturing Technology (SMT) to examine the use of advanced (computer based) technologies at two different points in time....

This study examines how Turkish manufacturing industry responded to increased competitive pressures that it has faced over the past decade. Pressures arose both from growing trade competition from low-cost countries which have similar trade specialisation patterns to Turkey’s, and from strong...

This paper deals with the use and outsourcing of production services by firms located in Italian industrial districts, using a survey from the Bank of Italy. The main results are the following: (i) Firms playing a leading role towards the other firms in the district make more use of marketing...