Productivity Program.

• Position: National Bureau of Economic Research conference papers - Industry Trend or Event - Critical Essay - Brief Article

Members and guests of the NBER's Program on Productivity, directed by Ernst R. Berndt of MIT, met in Cambridge on December 3. Ariel Pakes, NBER and Harvard University, organized the meeting and chose the following papers for discussion:

Bart Hobijn, New York University, and Boyan Jovanovic, NBER and New York University, "The Information Technology Revolution and the Stock Market: Preliminary Evidence" (For a description of this paper, see "Economic Fluctuations and Growth" earlier in this section of the Reporter.)

Discussant: Erik Byrnjolfsson, MIT Jose E. GaIdon Sanchez, London School of Economics, and James A. Schmitz, Jr., Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, "Threats to Industry Survival and Labor Productivity: World Iron-Ore Markets in the 1980s"

Discussant: James Tiebout, Pennsylvania State University James D. Adams, NBER and University of Florida; Eric P. Chiang, University of Florida; and Jeffrey L. Jensen, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, "Federal Laboratory R and D and the Performance of Industrial Laboratories"

Discussant: Adam B. Jaffe, NBER and Brandeis University James A. Levinsohn, NBER and University of Michigan, and Amil Petrin, University of Chicago, "Estimating Production Functions Using Intermediate Inputs to Control for Unobservables"

Discussant: Susanto Basu, NBER and University of Michigan Andrew B. Bernard, NBER and Dartmouth College; Jonathan Eaton and Samuel S. Kortum, NBER and Boston University; and J. Bradford Jensen, U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Plants and Productivity in International Trade: A Ricardian Reconciliation"

Discussant: Nina Pavcnik, Dartmouth College

In the early 1980s, the world steel market collapsed. Since iron ore is used almost exclusively in steel production, many iron-ore mines had to be shut down. Sanchez and Schmitz find that in countries where mines faced no threat of closure, the iron-ore industry had little or no productivity gain over the decade. In countries where mines faced a large threat of closure, the industry typically had productivity gains ranging from 50 to 100 percent, gains that were unprecedented. The authors then show that these productivity increases were not driven by new technology or selection but by continuing to operate mines, using existing technology, and by increasing the mines' productivity in order to stay in operation.

Adams, Chiang, and Jensen study the effect of federal laboratories on the performance of a sample of U.S. industrial laboratories. They find...