Anatomy of Technology in the Firm

Diego Comin, Xavier Cirera, Marcio Cruz and Kyung Min Lee

No 15427, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We collect detailed data on the technologies used in a comprehensive set of business functions in a representative sample of firms in Vietnam, Senegal, and the Brazilian state of Ceará, and construct measures of technology sophistication at the business function and firm levels. There is a large variance of sophistication across firms, but we find that the variance of technology sophistication across the business functions of a firm (within-firm variance) is 2.8 times larger. We develop a model of technology adoption with heterogeneity in adoption costs across business functions and with non-homothetic production that induces heterogeneity in the marginal value of technology sophistication across functions. The model predicts a stable cross-firm relationship between sophistication in the business function and firm-level technology that we call the technology curve. We find that the slopes of technology curves differ greatly across business functions and that curves account for one third of within-firm variance in sophistication. A development accounting exercise shows that cross-firm variation in sophistication measures accounts for thirty percent of cross-firm differences in productivity

Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15427 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Anatomy of Technology in the Firm (2020)
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:cpr:ceprdp:15427

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15427

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().