This paper examines the relationship between technology adoption and workforce skill in US manufacturing plants. Using information on the use and adoption of seven different information technologies, we find that the relationship between technology adoption and workforce skill varies across the...

There is considerable evidence that producer-level churning contributes substantially to aggregate (industry) productivity growth, as more productive businesses displace less productive ones. However, this research has been limited by the fact that producer-level prices are typically unobserved;...

The Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) underpins many studies of firm-level behavior. It tracks longitudinally all employers in the nonfarm private sector but lacks information about business financing and owner characteristics. We address this shortcoming by linking LBD...

An important gap in most empirical studies of establishment-level productivity is the limited information about workers' characteristics and their tasks. Skill-adjusted labor input measures have been shown to be important for aggregate productivity measurement. Moreover, the theoretical...

A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000...

We describe new experimental productivity statistics, Dispersion Statistics on Productivity (DiSP), jointly developed and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau. Official BLS productivity statistics provide information on aggregate productivity growth. Yet, a...

Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for...

What locations generate more business ideas, and where are ideas more likely to turn into businesses? Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications, we analyze the spatial disparity in the creation of business ideas and the formation of new employer startups from these ideas....

This paper estimates a dynamic, structural model of entry and exit in an oligopolistic industry and uses it to quantify the determinants of market structure and long-run firm values for two U.S. service industries, dentists and chiropractors. Entry costs faced by potential entrants, fixed costs...

This paper examines bidding behavior in a setting where post-bid-letting project modifications occur. These modifications change both the costs and payouts to the winning contractor, making the contract incomplete. Recent empirical research shows that bidders incorporate the likelihood of such...