In many industries, competition is far from perfect and managerial efficiency (or a fixed cost) varies among firms. However, traditional measurement of technological progress assumes perfect competition and no fixed cost. This paper incorporates these two factors in the technological-progress...

The LCA aerostructures industry is truly global, with manufacturers from all parts of the world supplying the two major remaining LCA producers, The Boeing Co. of the United States and the former Airbus Industrie, G.I.E. of France. Airbus is in the final stages of its transformation to a single...

This paper evaluates the recent literature claiming that the US economy has generally become less competitive causing the US economy to perform poorly and that lax antitrust policy is one important reason for the decline in economic performance. Although there certainly are empirical facts...

Based on the publicly available information on the data sources and methodology used by the Census Bureau to estimate e-commerce and physical retail sales, and based on detailed e-mail communications with the Census official responsible for the retail trade data, we found, in a version of this...

National industrial concentration in the U.S. has risen sharply since the early 1980s, but there remains dispute over whether local geographic concentration has followed a similar trend. Using near population data from the Economic Censuses, we confirm and extend existing evidence on national...

We study changes in markups across 72 product markets from 2006 to 2018. A growing literature has documented a rise in markups over time using a production function approach; we instead employ the standard microeconomic method, which is to estimate demand and then invert firms' first-order...

This paper estimates the nature and effects of quality and cost innovations in the early automobile, personal computer, rigid disk drive, computer monitor, and computer printer industries using industry-level data on firm numbers, price, quantity, and quality along with an equilibrium model of...

This paper explores the evolution of the average wage of employees over the life-cycle of a manufacturing plant. The average wage starts out low for a new plant and increases along with labor productivity as the plant ages. As a plant approaches exit, its average wage falls, but more slowly than...

What type of businesses do unions target for organizing? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity and decides which ones to organize and when. An establishment becomes...

Research Summary: Firm size has long been recognized as a source of competitive advantage. However, the disruptions arising from the knowledge-based global economy are decoupling the link between firm size and profitability. We demonstrate in this article, the structural shifts and evolving...