Many important economic problems require computation over state spaces that are not hypercubes. Examples include industry models of multi-product differentiated product firms, Bayesian learning problems with noisy signals and real business cycle models with heterogeneous agents. These problems have not been analyzed partly because of the difficulty in efficiently representing their state spaces...

In a recent paper in this journal, Wojcik (2000) argues that the nested logit model “is likely to be superior” to alternative random coefficients logit specifications, like those we and many others have used in recent work (e.g. Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995), henceforth BLP). Her conclusion is based on a within sample “prediction” exercise. We would like to raise several issues about her c...

This paper is about estimating productivity in the presence of product differentiation and in the absence of ideal data. By appealing to standard notions of market equilibrium and imposing structure on consumer demand, we show how one can estimate productivity when: 1) plant-level information about the physical attributes of output are not available; 2) the available measure of output is plant ...

What is the effect of imports on productivity? To answer this question, we estimate a structural model of producers using product-level import data for a panel of Hungarian manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2001. In our model with heterogenous firms, producers choose to import or purchase domestically varieties of intermediate inputs. Imports affect firm productivity through expanding variety as...

Takehito Kawakami ([email protected]) Tetsuro Sameshima ([email protected]) Hironobu Hojo ([email protected]) Kaori Koga ([email protected]) Yoshiaki Nakahara ([email protected]) Bryan P. Toole ([email protected]) Junji Suzumiya ([email protected]) Yasunori Okada ([email protected]) Akinori Iwasaki ([email protected]) Kazuki Nabeshima (kaznabe...

Prior experience with conspecifics or essential resources, as well as physiological condition, can have important influences on an animal’s reproductive behavior. While effects of experience and physiological state (such as reproductive condition) are generally treated separately in theoretical discussions, they often interact. Noprevious study has attempted todistinguish effects of experience ...

THE bacterial decomposition of formic acid is a subject which, in spite of its apparent simplicity, still presents unsolved problems; it was in the hope of elucidating some of these that the present study was undertaken. The earliest observation on the subject was made by Hoppe-Seyler [1875]. Later Pakes and Jollyman [1901] studied the anaerobic decomposition ow formates by bacteria in a state ...

We develop an estimator for the parameters of a utility function that has interactions between the unobserved demand error and observed factors including price. We show that the Berry (1994)/Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995) inversion and contraction can still be used to recover the mean utility term that now contains both the demand error and the interactions with the error. However, the inst...