This paper provides technical documentation to accompany the NBER manufacturing productivity (MP) database. The database contains information on 450 4-digit manufacturing industries for the period 1958 through 1991. The data are compiled from various official sources, most notably the Annual...

A longstanding puzzle of empirical economics is that average labor productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms. This paper provides a framework to assess the empirical importance of competing hypotheses for explaining the observed procyclicality. For each competing...

The conventional wisdom is that the rising productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector in the 1980s has been driven by the apparently pervasive downsizing over this period. Aggregate evidence clearly shows falling employment accompanying the rise in productivity. In this paper, we examine the...

In this paper we build upon previous work on external economies in manufacturing [Caballero and Lyons (1989, 1990)] by providing new evidence helpful for discriminating between different types of externalities. We investigate four-digit level input-output relationships and find that, over...

This paper combines different strands of the productivity literature to investigate the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. On the one hand, a growing body of empirical research has been relating cross-country differences in key economic outcomes, such...

Consistent with two models of imperfect competition in the labor market, the efficient bargaining model and the monopsony model, we provide two extensions of a microeconomic version of Hall's framework for estimating price-cost margins. We show that both product and labor market imperfections...

Empirical labor economists have resorted to estimating the responsiveness of workersʼ wages on firmsʼ ability to pay to assess the extent to which employers share rents with their employees. This paper compares this labor economics approach with two other approaches that rely on standard micro...

Allowing for three labor market settings (perfect competition or right-to-manage bargaining, efficient bargaining and monopsony), this paper relies on two extensions of Hallʼs econometric framework for estimating simultaneously price-cost margins and scale economies. Using an unbalanced panel...

Institutions, social norms and the nature of industrial relations vary greatly between Latin American and Western European countries. Such institutional and organizational differences might shape firms operational environment in general and the type of competition in product and labor markets in...

In this article we study differences in the returns to R&D investment between firms that sell in international markets and firms that only sell in the domestic market. We use German firm-level data from the high-tech manufacturing sector to estimate a dynamic structural model of a firm's...