This paper uses a new data set on domestic child adoption to document the preferences of potential adoptive parents over born and unborn babies relinquished for adoption by their birth mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant biases in favor of girls and against...

In this paper we study mergers in two-sided industries. While mergers have been studied extensively in traditional industries, and there is a large and rapidly evolving literature on two-sided markets, there has been little work empirically examining mergers in these markets. We present a model...

Plant level productivity in the ready-mix concrete sector is highly dispersed, whereby a plant in the 90th percentile of the distribution produces twice the value added than a plant in the 10th percentile. Is the magnitude of this dispersion real or simply an artifact of mea- surement error?...

We measure the impact of a drastic new technology for producing steel -- the minimill -- on the aggregate productivity of U.S. steel producers, using unique plant-level data between 1963 and 2002. We find that the sharp increase in the industry's productivity is linked to this new technology,...

This paper studies the role of technology and competition in industry-wide productivity growth. We rely on a unique producer-level dataset covering U.S. steel producers between 1963 and 2002 to measure the impact of a drastic new production technology, the minimill, on aggregate productivity. In...

Fluctuations in demand cause some plants to exit a market and other to enter. Would eliminating these ‡uctuations reduce plant turnover? A structural model of entry and exit in concentrated markets is estimated for the ready-mix concrete industry, using plant level data from the U.S. Census....