Productivity.

• Position: Bureau News

The NBER's Program on Productivity met in Cambridge on December 7. Mark J. Roberts, NBER and Pennsylvania State University, organized this program:

Tor Jakob Kiette, University of Oslo, and Arvind Raknerud, Statistics Norway, "How and Why Do Firms Differ?"

Discussant: Nadia Soboleva, University of Toronto

Johannes Van Biesebroeck, University of Toronto, "Productivity Dynamics with Technology Choice: An Application to Automobile Assembly"

Discussant: David Ackerberg; NBER and University of California at Los Angeles

Plutarchos Sakellaris and Daniel J. Wilson, University of Maryland, "The Production Side Approach to Estimating Embodied Technological Change"

Discussant: Russell Cooper, NBER and Boston University

John Abowd, NBER and Cornell University; John Haltiwanger, NBER and University of Maryland; Julia Lane, Urban Institute; and Kristin Sandusky, U.S. Census Bureau, "Within and Between Firm Changes in Human Capital, Technology, and Productivity"

Discussant: Eli Berman, NBER and Boston University

John Haltiwanger; Lucia Foster, U.S. Census Bureau; and C.J. Krizan, Fannie Mae, "The Link Between Aggregate and Micro Productivity Growth: Evidence from Retail Trade"

Discussant: Thomas Holmes,. University of Minnesota

How do firms differ, and why do they differ even within narrowly defined industries? Klette and Raknerud show that the non-transient differences in sales, materials, labor costs, and capital across firms can be summarized largely by a single, firm-specific, dynamic factor, which they label efficiency in light of a structural model. The structural model suggests that this measure is linked tightly to profitability, but unrelated to labor productivity. The authors' second task is to understand the origin and evolution of the persistent differences in efficiency. They find that among firms born within a period of 24 years, intrinsic (time-invariant) efficiency differences dominate differences generated by firm-specific, cumulated innovations. The authors' conclusions are based on evidence from six high-tech, manufacturing industries.

During the 1980s, all Japanese automobile producers opened assembly plants in North America. Industry analysts and previous research claim that these transplants are more productive than incumbent plants and that they produce with a substantially different production process. Van Biesebroeck compares the production processes by estimating a model that allows for heterogeneity in technology and...