This paper explores the effect on costs when firms within an industry must interact with each other in the normal course of business. Such interaction will generally cause the socially optimal scale of each firm to deviate from its minimum average cost scale. In addition, the socially optimal...

With seemingly minor amendments to the standard techniques of measuring banking technology, we have uncovered important empirical phenomena that point to the crucial role played by financial capital in banking and financial intermediation. The authors employ a standard cost function, conditioned...

Exporters are few-less than one-fifth among U.S. manufacturing firms-and are larger than non-exporting firms-about 4-5 times more total sales per firm. These facts are often cited as support for models with economies of scale and firm heterogeneity as in Melitz (2003). The authors find that the...

The Great Recession focused attention on large financial institutions and systemic risk. We investigate whether large size provides any cost advantages to the economy and, if so, whether these cost advantages are due to technological scale economies or too-big-to-fail subsidies. Estimating scale...