Research

Distribution expenses incurred by Indian manufacturing firms are large — over half of labor costs; disproportionately higher for larger firms and declined by one third between 2000 and 2010. Through the lens of a quantitative model, improvements in the distribution sector over that time lead to manufacturing consumption gains of 25%.

We estimate long-run elasticities of substitution between intermediate inputs for Indian manufacturing plants using India's trade liberalization for identification. We find a high degree of substitutability at the plant-level between 8 broad categories of material inputs, significantly above the Cobb-Douglas benchmark of 1. In contrast, when considering shorter time horizons or more transitory shocks to relative prices, we find evidence of much lower elasticities.

We show that production networks play an essential role in the job search and matching process using administrative data for the Dominican Republic. One in five workers who change firm move to a buyer or supplier of their original employer — significantly more than predicted by standard labor market characteristics. These moves are associated with a persistent earnings premium. Survey evidence points to supply chain-specific human capital and better information about job applicants as the main reasons for hiring within the supply chain.

We document new stylized facts showing that the business dynamism of Chinese manufacturing firms declined between 2003 and 2018. Lower life-cycle productivity growth of young firms reduces manufacturing productivity growth by 0.8 percentage points annually, and worsening allocative efficiency of capital between young and old firms reduced manufacturing TFP by 1.25 percent between the early 2000s and late 2010s.

We develop and estimate a quantitative model to analyze the aggregate productivity consequences of informality in Mexico. We document a high and rising share of large informal firms between 1998 and 2013. We find that the factors most important for the decline in aggregate productivity were not important drivers of the increase in informality, and conversely, the factors most important for the increase in informality had little impact on aggregate productivity.

We propose a way to estimate the gaps in true marginal products in the presence of measurement error. For Indian manufacturing from 1985 to 2013, our correction lowers potential gains from reallocation by 20%. For the U.S. the effect is even more dramatic, reducing potential gains by 60% and eliminating 2/3 of a severe downward trend in allocative efficiency over 1978 to 2013.

In this paper I present empirical evidence from an industrial exhibition in Ireland as to the geographic distribution of the quality of Irish manufactured products in 1883. My main finding is that manufacturers from the north-east were on average producing higher quality products than those from other parts of the country. This finding is consistent with the fact that Irish industrialization between 1850 and 1900 was mostly confined to the north-east of Ireland. Further research into the evolution of Irish manufacturing activity may help discriminate between existing theories explaining the localized industrialization which characterized Ireland in the 19th century.