Listing 1 - 10 of 47 | << page >> |
Sort by
|
Choose an application
Choose an application
The sections in this book are devoted to new approaches and usages of stainless steels, the influence of the environments on the behavior of certain classes of steels, new structural concepts to understand some fatigue processes, new insight on strengthening mechanisms, and toughness in microalloyed steels. The kinetics during tempering in low-alloy steels is also discussed through a new set-up that uses a modified Avrami formalism.
Alloys. --- Metallic alloys --- Metallic composites --- Metals --- Phase rule and equilibrium --- Amalgamation --- Microalloying --- Metals technology / metallurgy
Choose an application
Choose an application
Many economic decisions involve a binary choice - for example, when consumers decide to purchase a good or when firms decide to enter a new market. In such settings, agents' choices often depend on imperfect expectations of the future payoffs from their decision (expectational error) as well as factors that the econometrician does not observe (structural error). In this paper, we show that expectational error, under an assumption of rational expectations, is a source of classical measurement error, and we propose a novel moment inequality estimator that accounts for both expectational error and structural error in a binary choice model. With simulated data and Chilean firm-level customs data, we illustrate the identifying power of our inequalities and show the biases that arise when one ignores either source of error. We use the customs data to estimate the fixed costs exporters face when entering a new market.
Choose an application
Much of the variation in international trade volume is driven by firms' extensive margin decision to participate in export markets. To understand this decision and predict the sensitivity of export flows to changes in trade costs, we estimate a standard model of firms' export participation. In choosing whether to export, firms weigh the fixed costs of exporting against the forecasted profits from serving a foreign market. We show that the estimated parameters and counterfactual predictions from the model depend heavily on how the researcher specifies firms' expectations over these profits. We therefore develop a novel moment inequality approach with weaker assumptions on firms' expectations. Our approach introduces a new set of moment inequalities --odds-based inequalities-- and applies the revealed preference inequalities introduced in Pakes (2010) to a new setting. We use data from Chilean exporters to show that, relative to methods that require specifying firms' information sets, our approach generates estimates of fixed export costs that are 65-85% smaller. Counterfactual reductions in fixed costs generate gains in export participation that are 30% smaller, on average, than those predicted by existing approaches.
Choose an application
When firms operate production plants in multiple countries, technological improvements developed in one country may be shared with firm sites abroad for efficiency gain. We develop a dynamic model that allows for such intrafirm transfer, and apply it to measure the impact of innovation on performance for a panel of U.S. multinationals. Our estimates indicate U.S. parent R&D raises performance significantly at firm locations abroad, and also complements R&D by affiliates. Parent R&D is a substantially more important determinant of firm performance than affiliate R&D. We identify these R&D effects using variation in location-specific innovation policies.
Choose an application
Choose an application
Exporting firms continuously change export destinations. We present reduced-form evidence indicating firms are more likely to export to countries that are geographically close to their previous destinations. This evidence for path dependence in exports is robust to controlling for firm-country specific unobservable determinants of export choices that might be correlated over time and space. Accordingly, we develop a model of export dynamics in which firms' exports in each market may depend on: (a) how similar this market is to the firm's home country (gravity), and (b) how similar it is to other countries to which the firm has previously exported (extended gravity). Given the large number of possible export paths from which forward-looking firms may choose, estimation approaches based on discrete choice models are computationally infeasible. Instead, we use a moment inequality approach. We conclude that extended gravity effects may reduce the cost of entering an export market by up to 40%.
Choose an application
We provide an assignment model to decompose changes in between-group wage inequality into changes in the composition of the workforce, the productivity/demand for tasks, computerization, and labor productivity. The model incorporates comparative advantage between many groups of workers, many types of equipment, and many tasks and yet may be parameterized and estimated in a transparent manner. Our identification of parameters, measurement of shocks, and the equilibrium equation determining wages are all very similar to what have been used in previous reduced-form analyses. We use U.S. data on the allocation of workers to occupations and computer usage as well as changes in average wages across worker groups between 1984 and 2003 to parameterize our model. We find that computerization and changes in task productivity/demand, which are both measured without directly using data on changes in wages, jointly explain the majority of the rise in the skill premium and more disaggregated measures of between-eduation group inequality as well as roughly half of the rise in the relative wage of women over this time period. We show how to link the strength of these two forces to changes in the extent of international trade.
Choose an application
We study inference in shift-share regression designs, such as when a regional outcome is regressed on a weighted average of observed sectoral shocks, using regional sector shares as weights. We conduct a placebo exercise in which we estimate the effect of a shift-share regressor constructed with randomly generated sectoral shocks on actual labor market outcomes across U.S. Commuting Zones. Tests based on commonly used standard errors with 5% nominal significance level reject the null of no effect in up to 55% of the placebo samples. We use a stylized economic model to show that this overrejection problem arises because regression residuals are correlated across regions with similar sectoral shares, independently of their geographic location. We derive novel inference methods that are valid under arbitrary cross-regional correlation in the regression residuals. We show that our methods yield substantially wider confidence intervals in popular applications of shift-share regression designs.
Listing 1 - 10 of 47 | << page >> |
Sort by
|