Most studies about the effects of producers’ services on manufacturing agglomeration focus on the effects themselves while neglecting the mechanism that such effects spread. By stressing the key role of trade costs in the process of manufacturing agglomeration, this paper identifies a chain of effects from producers’ service improvements to manufacturing agglomeration via changing trade costs a...

Using new crosscountry data on industry-specific product market regulations, this paper investigates the relationship between wage premia and some of the policy determinants of product market rents. Hourly wage premia in 2-digit manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries are estimated from detailed data on wage earnings in (or around) 1996 by category of worker (age, sex, education and type...

Using 1959—1991 growth rates for 449 4-digit US manufacturing industries, I test ‘idea’ and ‘rival human capital’ models of endogenous growth. I find the following: First, TFP growth is faster in industries that are more intensive in capital and intermediate goods and less intensive in labor, favoring idea models over rival human capital models. Second, industries with rapidly declining prices ...

E conomists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between fi rms and countries. For example, looking at disaggregated data on U.S. manufacturing industries, Syverson (2004a) found that plants at the 90 percentile produced four times as much as the plant in the 10 percentile on a per-employee basis. Only half of this difference in labor productivity could be accounted...

In the past two decades, China’s manufacturing exports have grown spectacularly, U.S. imports from China have surged, but U.S. exports to China have increased only modestly. Using representative, longitudinal data on individual earnings by employer, we analyze the effect of exposure to import competition on earnings and employment of U.S. workers over 1992 through 2007. Individuals who in 1991 ...

This paper presents estimates of the degree of returns to scale using nonparametric measures of primal and dual productivity for 2-digit US manufacturing industries. As part of the analysis, the cyclical behaviour of primal and dual productivity measures are considered, time-varying markups are allowed for, and the small sample properties of the instrumental variables estimator used to derive t...

T to the massive infusion of detailed production activity data into economic study over the past couple of decades, researchers in many fields have learned a great deal about how firms turn inputs into outputs. Productivity, the efficiency with which this conversion occurs, has been a topic of particular interest. The particulars of these studies have varied depending on the researchers’ specif...