Productivity.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meeting - National Bureau of Economic Research Program on Productivity

The NBER's Program on Productivity met in Cambridge on December 1, 2006. Nick Bloom and Kathryn L. Shaw, Stanford University and NBER, organized the program. These papers were discussed:

Jan De Loecker, New York University, "Product Differentiation, Multi-Product Firms and Structural Estimation of Productivity"

Discussant: Marc Muendler, University of California, San Diego

Francine Lafontaine and Jagadeesh Sivadasan, University of Michigan, "The Microeconomic Implications of Input Market Regulations:Cross-Country Evidence from Within the Firm"

Discussant: Lee Branstetter, Carnegie-Mellon University and NBER

Nick Bloom; Raffaela Sadun, London School of Economics; and John Van Reenen, London School of Economics and NBER, "It Ain't What You Do But the Way that You Do IT: Investigating the U.S. Productivity Miracle Using Multinationals"

Discussant: Susanto Basu, Boston College and NBER

Anne P. Bartel and Casey Ichinowski, Columbia University and NBER; Kathryn L. Shaw; and Ricard Correa, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, "International Differences in the Adoption and Impact of New Information Technologies and New HR Practices: The Valve-Making Industry in the U.S. and the U.K."

Discussant: Scott Stern, Northwestern University and NBER

Sabien Dobbelaere, Ghent University, and Jacques Mairesse, CREST and NBER, "Product Market and Labor Market Imperfections and Heterogeneity in Panel Data Estimates of the Production Function"

Discussant: Chad Syversson, University of Chicago and NBER

Bronwyn H. Hall, University of California, Berkeley and NBER; Grid Thoma, University of Bocconi; and Salvatore Torrisi, University of Bologna, "The Market Value of Patents and R&D: Evidence from European Firms"

Discussant: Megan MacGarvie, Boston University and NBER

De Loecker proposes a methodology for estimating (total factor) productivity in an environment of product differentiation and multi-product firms. In addition to correcting for the simultaneity bias in the estimation of production functions, he controls for the omitted price bias, as documented by Klette and Griliches (1996). By aggregating demand and production from product space into firm space, he can use plant-level data to estimate productivity. The productivity estimates are corrected for demand shocks and, as by-products, he recovers the elasticity of demand and implied mark-ups. He applies this methodology to the Belgian textile industry, using a dataset where he has matched firm-level with...