TY  - JOUR
AU  - Petrin,Amil
AU  - Levinsohn,James
TI  - Measuring Aggregate Productivity Growth Using Plant-Level Data
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11887
PY  - 2005
Y2  - December 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11887
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11887.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Amil Petrin
Department of Economics
University of Minnesota
4-101 Hanson Hall
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Tel: 612/625-0145
Fax: 612/624-0209
E-Mail: petrin@umn.edu

James A. Levinsohn
Yale School of Management
PO Box 208200
New Haven, CT  06520
Tel: 734/763-2319
Fax: 734/764-2769
E-Mail: James.Levinsohn@yale.edu
AB  - We define aggregate productivity growth as the change in aggregate final demand minus the change in the aggregate cost of primary inputs. We show how to aggregate plant-level data to this measure and how to use plant-level data to decompose our measure into technical efficiency and reallocation components. This requires us to confront the "non-neoclassical" features that impact plant-level data including plant-level heterogeneity, the entry and exit of goods, adjustment costs, fixed and sunk costs, and market power. We compare our measure of aggregate productivity growth to several competing variants that are based only on a single plant-level factor of technical efficiency. We show that theory suggests our measure may differ substantially from these measures of aggregate productivity growth. We illustrate this using panel data from manufacturing industries in Chile. We find that our measure does differ substantially from other widely used measures with especially marked differences in the fraction of productivity growth attributed to reallocation.
ER  -