We develop a large customer-level database to study electricity pricing to U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963 to 2000. We document tremendous dispersion in price per kWh, trace that dispersion to quantity discounts and spatial differentials, estimate the role of cost factors in quantity...

We develop and implement a method to improve estimates of worker flows and job openings based on the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). Our method involves reweighting the cross-sectional density of employment growth rates in JOLTS to match the corresponding density in the...

Improvements in the software that provides hardware management, user interface and platform functions have played a central role in the growth and transformation of the personal computer (PC) industry. Several forces shape the design of these 'operating system' products and propel their...

We combine information from several different studies and data sets to assemble a fuller, more accurate picture of job flows and worker flows in U.S. labor markets. Our picture characterizes the magnitudes of job and worker flows, the connections between them, their cyclical behavior,...

Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses and few gains in operating performance. To evaluate these claims, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. buyouts from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments before and...

U.S. labor markets became much less fluid in recent decades. Job reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 1990, and worker reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 2000. The declines cut across states, industries and demographic groups defined by age, gender and education....

There appears to be a strong upward drift in policy-related economic uncertainty after 1960. We consider two classes of explanations for this rise. The first stresses growth in government spending, taxes, and regulation. A second stresses increased political polarization and its implications for...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is the increase the flexibility of robots used for handling of 3D (food) objects handling by the development and evaluation of a novel 3D Bernoulli gripper. Design/methodology/approach – A new gripper technology have been designed and evaluated. A...