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CES-WP-08-41 Cementing Relationships: Vertical Integration, Foreclosure, Productivity, and Prices Ali Hortacsu, Chad Syverson December 01, 2008 This paper empirically investigates the possible market power effects of vertical integration proposed in the theoretical literature on vertical foreclosure. It uses a rich data set of cement and ready-mixed concrete plants that spans several decades to perform a detailed case study. There is little evidence that foreclosure is quantitatively important in these industries. Instead, prices fall, quantities rise, and entry rates remain unchanged when markets become more integrated. These patterns are consistent, however, with an alternative efficiency-based mechanism. Namely, higher productivity producers are more likely to vertically integrate and are also larger, more likely to survive, and charge lower prices. We find evidence that integrated producers’ productivity advantage is tied to improved logistics coordination afforded by large local concrete operations. Interestingly, this benefit is not due to firms’ vertical structures per se: non-vertical firms with large local concrete operations have similarly high productivity levels. View Paper   61 Pages 221520 Bytes

CES-WP-08-40 Manufacturing Plants' Use of Temporary Workers: An Analysis Using Census Micro Data Yukako Ono, Daniel Sullivan December 01, 2008 Using plant-level data from the Plant Capacity Utilization (PCU) Survey, we examine how manufacturing plants’ use of temporary workers is associated with the nature of their output fluctuations and other plant characteristics. We find that plants tend to hire temporary workers when their output can be expected to fall, a result consistent with the notion that firms use temporary workers to reduce costs associated with dismissing permanent employees. In addition, we find that plants whose future output levels are subject to greater uncertainty tend to use more temporary workers. We also examine the effects of wage and benefit levels for permanent workers, unionization rates, turnover rates, seasonal factors, and plant size and age on the use of temporary workers; based on our results, we discuss various views of why firms use temporary workers. View Paper   41 Pages 193401 Bytes

CES-WP-08-39 Gender Differences in Business Performance: Evidence from the Characteristics of Business Owners Survey Robert Fairlie, Alicia Robb December 01, 2008 Using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we investigate the performance of female-owned businesses making comparisons to male-owned businesses. Using regression estimates and a decomposition technique, we explore the role that human capital, especially through prior work experience, and financial capital play in contributing to why female-owned businesses have lower survival rates, profits, employment and sales. We find that female-owned businesses are less successful than male-owned businesses because they have less startup capital, and business human capital acquired through prior work experience in a similar business and prior work experience in family business. We also find some evidence that femaleowned businesses work fewer hours and may have different preferences for the goals of their business. View Paper   51 Pages 144184 Bytes

CES-WP-08-38 Measuring Labor Earnings Inequality Using Public-Use March Current Population Survey Data: The Value of Including Variances and Cell Means When Imputing Topcoded Values Richard Burkhauser, Shuaizhang Feng, Jeff Larrimore November 01, 2008 Using the Census Bureau’s internal March Current Population Surveys (CPS) file, we construct and make available variances and cell means for all topcoded income values in the publicuse version of these data. We then provide a procedure that allows researchers with access only to the public-use March CPS data to take advantage of this added information when imputing its topcoded income values. As an example of its value we show how our new procedure improves on existing imputation methods in the labor earnings inequality literature. View Paper   39 Pages 230095 Bytes

CES-WP-08-37 Local Industrial Conditions and Entrepreneurship: How Much of the Spatial Distribution Can We Explain? Edward Glaeser, William Kerr October 01, 2008 Why are some places more entrepreneurial than others? We use Census Bureau data to study local determinants of manufacturing startups across cities and industries. Demo- graphics have limited explanatory power. Overall levels of local customers and suppliers are only modestly important, but new entrants seem particularly drawn to areas with many smaller suppliers, as suggested by Chinitz (1961). Abundant workers in relevant occupations also strongly predict entry. These forces plus city and industry fixed effects explain between sixty and eighty percent of manufacturing entry. We use spatial distributions of natural cost advantages to address partially endogeneity concerns. View Paper   52 Pages 377518 Bytes

CES-WP-08-36 Linking Investment Spikes and Productivity Growth: U.S. Food Manufacturing Industry Pinar Celikkol Geylani, Spiro Stefanou October 01, 2008 We investigate the relationship between productivity growth and investment spikes using Census Bureau’s plant-level data set for the U.S. food manufacturing industry. We find that productivity growth increases after investment spikes suggesting an efficiency gain or plants’ learning effect. However, efficiency and the learning period associated with investment spikes differ among plants’ productivity quartile ranks implying the differences in the plants’ investment types such as expansionary, replacement or retooling. We find evidence of both convex and non-convex types of adjustment costs where lumpy plant-level investments suggest the possibility of non-convex adjustment costs and hazard estimation results suggest the possibility of convex adjustment costs. The downward sloping hazard can be due to the unobserved heterogeneity across plants such as plants’ idiosyncratic obsolescence caused by different R&D capabilities and implies the existence of convex adjustment costs. Food plants frequently invest during their first few years of operation and high productivity plants postpone investing due to high fixed costs. View Paper   52 Pages 243480 Bytes

CES-WP-08-35 The Effects of Smoking in Young Adulthood on Smoking and Health Later in Life: Evidence Based on the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery Daniel Eisenberg, Brian Rowe September 01, 2008 An important, unresolved question for health policymakers and consumers is whether cigarette smoking in young adulthood has significant lasting effects into later adulthood. The Vietnam era draft lottery offers an opportunity to address this question, because it randomly assigned young men to be more likely to experience conditions favoring cigarette consumption, including highly subsidized prices. Using this natural experiment, we find that military service increased the probability of smoking by 35 percentage points as of 1978-80, when men in the relevant cohorts were aged 25-30, but later in adulthood this effect was substantially attenuated and did not lead to large negative health effects. View Paper   39 Pages 269602 Bytes

CES-WP-08-34 The Green Industry: An Examination of Environmental Products Manufacturing Randy Becker, Ronald Shadbegian September 01, 2008 The “green industry” is often noted in discussions of the costs and benefits of environmental policy, and it has been characterized as a unique industry with substantial potential for employment growth, well-paying jobs, and export opportunities. In this paper, we examine the characteristics and recent economic performance of the green industry, using establishment-level data on environmental products manufacturers (EPMs) from the 1995 Survey of Environmental Products and Services, together with data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures and various Census of Manufactures. Results suggest that there are some differences between EPMs and their non-EPM counterparts in the same industry, in terms of employment, employee compensation, exports, and productivity. However, we do not find any evidence that EPMs performed any better than otherwise similar plants, in terms of survival, employment growth, wage growth, and export growth. Our findings offer a more complex and nuanced portrayal of the green industry than is typical, and we suggest that this industry may not be as exceptional as is sometimes maintained. View Paper   39 Pages 246759 Bytes

CES-WP-08-33 Productivity Dispersion and Input Prices: The Case of Electricity Steven Davis, Cheryl Grim, John Haltiwanger September 01, 2008 We exploit a rich new database on Prices and Quantities of Electricity in Manufacturing (PQEM) to study electricity productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector. The database contains nearly 2 million customer-level observations (i.e., manufacturing plants) from 1963 to 2000. It allows us to construct plant-level measures of price paid per kWh, output per kWh, output per dollar spent on electric power and labor productivity. Using this database, we first document tremendous dispersion among U.S. manufacturing plants in electricity productivity measures and a strong negative relationship between price per kWh and output per kWh hour within narrowly defined industries. Using an IV strategy to isolate exogenous price variation, we estimate that the average elasticity of output per kWh with respect to the price of electricity is about 0.6 during the period from 1985 to 2000. We also develop evidence that this price-physical efficiency tradeoff is stronger for industries with bigger electricity cost shares. Finally, we develop evidence that stronger competitive pressures in the output market lead to less dispersion among manufacturing plants in price per kWh and in electricity productivity measures. The strength of competition effects on dispersion is similar for electricity productivity and labor productivity. View Paper   41 Pages 323005 Bytes

CES-WP-08-32 A Comparison of Employee Benefits Data from the MEPS-IC and Form 5500 Kristin McCue September 01, 2008 This paper compares data on employers’ health and pension offerings from the two sources: publicly available administrative data from Form 5500 filings and survey data from the Insurance Component of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS-IC). The basic findings are that the 5500 filings cover too few health plans to be very useful as a substitute or supplement to the MEPS-IC measure of whether or not employers offer health insurance. The pension information in the 5500 filings is potentially more useful as a supplement to the MEPSIC for research purposes where additional pension information would be useful in studying employers’ decisions to offer health insurance. * View Paper   18 Pages 382235 Bytes

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