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We measure the impact of a drastic new technology for producing steel – the minimill – on the aggregate productivity of U.S. steel producers, using unique plant-level data between 1963 and 2002. We find that the sharp increase in the industry's productivity is linked to this new technology, and operates through two distinct mechanisms. First, minimills displaced the older technology, called vertically integrated production, and this reallocation of output was responsible for a third of the increase in the industry's productivity. Second, increased competition, due to the expansion of minimills, drove a substantial reallocation process within the group of vertically integrated producers, driving a resurgence in their productivity, and consequently of the industry's productivity as a whole.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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This paper uses a new data set on child-adoption matching to document the preferences of potential adoptive parents over U.S.-born and unborn children relinquished for adoption by their birth mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant preferences in favor of girls and against African- American children. A non-African-American child relinquished for adoption attracts the interest of potential adoptive parents with probability 11.5% if it is a girl and 7.9% if it is a boy. As for race, a non-African-American child has a probability of attracting the interest of an adopting parent at least seven times as high as the corresponding probability for an African-American child. In addition, we show that a child's desirability in the adoption process depends significantly on time to birth (increasing over the pregnancy, but decreasing after birth) and on adoption costs. We also document the attitudes toward children' characteristics across different categories of adoptive parents – heterosexual and same-sex couples, as well as single women and foreign couples. Finally, we consider several recently discussed policies excluding same-sex and foreign couples from the adoption process. In our data, such policies would reduce the number of adopted children by 6% and 33%, respectively, and have a disproportionate effect on African-American children.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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Endemic blackouts are a particularly salient example of how poor infrastructure might reduce growth in developing economies. As a case study, we analyze how Indian textile plants respond to weekly “power holidays.” We then study how electricity shortages affect all Indian manufacturers, using an instrument based on hydroelectricity production and a hybrid Leontief/Cobb-Douglas production function model. Shortages reduce average output by about five percent, but because most inputs can be stored during outages, productivity losses are much smaller. Plants without generators have much larger losses, and because of economies of scale in generator capacity, shortages more severely affect small plants.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie