Whittling Away At Productivity Dispersion Futher Notes: Persistent Dispersion or Measurement Error?

Douglas W Dwyer

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: This note considers several hypotheses regarding measurement error as a source of observed cross-sectional dispersion in plant-level productivity in the US textile industry. The hypotheses that reporting error and/or price rigidity in either materials and/or output account for a substantial portion of the observed dispersion in productivity are consistent with the data. Similarly, the hypothesis that transitory product niches or fashion effects lead to differential markups and consequently dispersion in observed productivity is consistent with the data. The hypothesis that transfer pricing problems lead to persistent differences in plant-level productivity, in contrast, does not appear to be consistent with the data. Finally, the hypothesis that some plants have permanent product niches that lead to dispersion in observed productivity does not appear to be consistent with data. In order to avoid imposing a strong functional form on the data, this note follows a non-parametric methodology developed in the early paper.

Keywords: CES; economic; research; micro; data; microdata; chief; economist (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/1996/CES-WP-96-11.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:96-11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson (dawn.m.anderson@census.gov).