Misallocation or Mismeasurement? / Mark Bils, Peter J. Klenow, Cian Ruane.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bils, Mark.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Klenow, Peter J.

Ruane, Cian.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26711.

NBER working paper series no. w26711

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

The ratio of revenue to inputs differs greatly across plants within countries such as the U.S. and India. Such gaps may reflect misallocation which hinders aggregate productivity. But differences in measured average products need not reflect differences in true marginal products. We propose a way to estimate the gaps in true marginal products in the presence of measurement error. Our method exploits how revenue growth is less sensitive to input growth when a plant's average products are overstated by measurement error. For Indian manufacturing from 1985-2013, our correction lowers potential gains from reallocation by 20%. For the U.S. the effect is even more dramatic, reducing potential gains by 60% and eliminating 2/3 of a severe downward trend in allocative efficiency over 1978-2013.

Notes:

Print version record

January 2020.