Materials Prices and Productivity

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

Abstract: There is substantial within-industry variation, even within industries that use and produce homogeneous inputs and outputs, in the prices that plants pay for their material inputs. I explore, using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the consequences and sources of this variation in materials prices. For a sample of industries with relatively homogeneous products, the standard deviation of plant-level productivities would be 7% lower if all plants faced the same materials prices. Moreover, plant-level materials prices are both persistent across time and predictive of exit. The contribution of net entry to aggregate productivity growth is smaller for productivity measures that strip out di¤erences in materials prices. After documenting these patterns, I discuss three potential sources of materials price variation: geography, di¤erences in suppliers. marginal costs, and suppliers. price discriminatory behavior. Together, these variables account for 13% of the dispersion of materials prices. Finally, I demonstrate that plants.marginal costs are correlated with the marginal costs of their intermediate input suppliers.

Keywords: CES; economic; research; micro; data; microdata (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 72 pages
Date: 2012-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-hme and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2012/CES-WP-12-11.pdf First version, 2012 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: MATERIALS PRICES AND PRODUCTIVITY (2014)
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:12-11

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 ().