We analyze employment and capital adjustments using plant data from the Colombian Annual Manufacturing Survey. We estimate adjustment functions for capital and labor as a non-linear function of the gaps between desired and actual factor levels, allowing for interdependence in adjustments of the...

In this paper, we exploit plant-level data for U.S. manufacturing for the 1970s and 1980s to explore the connections between changes in technology and the structure of employment and wages. We focus on the nonproduction labor share (measured alternatively by employment and wages) as the variable...

Using establishment-level data, we shed light on the sources of the changes in the structure of production, wages, and employment that have occurred over recent decades. Our findings are: (1) the between-plant component of wage dispersion is an important and growing part of total wage...

This paper studies capital adjustment at the establishment level. Our goal is to characterize capital adjustment costs, which are important for understanding both the dynamics of aggregate investment and the impact of various policies on capital accumulation. Our estimation strategy searches for...

In this note we document how constraints in the business environment, as perceived by individual firms, differ both across countries and within each country, across firms. This finding is of key importance given recent theoretical models that suggest idiosyncratic distortions can have large...

This paper studies capital adjustment at the establishment level. Our goal is to characterize capital adjustment costs, which are important for understanding both the dynamics of aggregate investment and the impact of various policies on capital accumulation. Our estimation strategy searches for...

Unemployment inflows fell from 4 percent of employment per month in the early 1980s to 2 percent by the mid 1990s. Using low frequency movements in industry-level data, we estimate that a 1 percentage point drop in the quarterly job destruction rate lowers the monthly unemployment inflow rate by...

In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned (a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail establishments, several empirical studies have examined the evidence on how Big-Boxes’ impact local retail employment but no clear consensus has emerged. To help shed light on...

There’s been a long, sometimes heated, debate on the role of firm size in employment growth. Despite skepticism in the academic community, the notion that growth is negatively related to firm size remains appealing to policymakers and small business advocates. The widespread and repeated claim...