Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period....

How different are retailers' inventory levels around the world? Specifically, are retailers' inventories constant across countries, converging, or at least co-integrating? These might be viewed as various forms of global determinism. To see which of these forms hold, I use a novel dataset...

This paper estimates technology growth using several variants of the Hall (1988, 1990) method on data for Swedish two-digit manufacturing industries. More specifically, I first apply and evaluate two different approaches to control for varying factor utilization developed by Basu et al. (1998)...

This paper derives estimates of the degree of the returns to scale for 2-digit US manufacturing industries using the cost-based primal and dual equations implied by firms' cost-minimization problem. The purpose is to reconcile the cyclical behavior of the primal and dual productivity residuals...

This paper estimates technology growth using several variants of the Hall (1988, 1990) method on data for Swedish two-digit manufacturing industries. More specifically, I first apply and evaluate two different approaches to control for varying factor utilization developed by Basu et al. (1998)...

In this paper, we derive and estimate relationships governing variable utilization of capital and labor for a firm solving a dynamic cost-minimization problem. Our method allows for (i) imperfect competition, (ii) increasing returns to scale, (iii) unobserved changes in utilization, (iv)...

This paper estimates the price-marginal cost markup for US manufacturing using a new methodology. Most existing techniques of estimating the markup are a variant on Hall's (1988) framework involving the manipulation of the Solow Residual. However this paper argues that this notion is based on...

Awareness and ability to possibly eliminate the potentially adverse consequences of economic fluctuations can constitute an extremely important factor of the financial condition and competitive position of the company as well as the entire construction sector. Especially in the construction...

Using plant level panel data on Korean manufacturing during the 1990-98 period, this study tries to assess the role of entry and exit in enhancing aggregate productivity, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The main findings of this study are summarised as follows. First, plant entry and exit...