Staying Power: The Future of Manufacturing in Massachusetts

Reviews the state's manufacturing employment since 1939; analyzes current data by industry, economic share, workers' demographics, and location; and projects trends through 2016. Based on surveys and interviews, examines manufacturers' perspectives

Practices for strategic capacity management in Malaysian manufacturing firms

While the notion of manufacturing capabilities is a long-standing notion in research on operations management, its actual implementation and management has been hardly researched. Five case studies in Malaysia offered the opportunity to examine the practice of manufacturing managers with regard to strategic capability management. The data collection and analysis was structured by using the notion of Strategic Capacity Management. Whereas traditionally literature has demonstrated the beneficial impact of an appropriate manufacturing strategy on the business strategy and performance, the study highlights the difficulty of managers to set the strategy, let alone implementing it. This is partly caused by the immense pressure of customers in these dominantly Make-To-Order environments for SMEs. Current concepts for manufacturing capabilities have insufficiently accounted this phenomenon and an outline of a research agenda is presented

The Ifo Industry Growth Accounting Database

In this paper we present a new database that allows deep industry-level growth accounting from 1991–2003. The database allows for the first complete analysis of the German industry performance drivers based on the contributions of 12 asset types in 52 different industries. The industry sources of productivity and output growth are crucial to the understanding of the transformation of the German economy from manufacturing to information technology and service industries. The database enables researchers to develop an adequate picture of the sources of growth using standard growth accounting techniques. We formally document the new data series and its origins, with special focus on the capital stock and capital service data.growth accounting, industry productivity analysis

Performance evaluation using bootstrapping DEA techniques: Evidence from industry ratio analysis

In Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) context financial data/ ratios have been used in order to produce a unified measure of performance metric. However, several scholars have indicated that the inclusion of financial ratios create biased efficiency estimates with implications on firms’ and industries’ performance evaluation. There have been several DEA formulations and techniques dealing with this problem including sensitivity analysis, Prior-Ratio-Analysis and DEA/ output–input ratio analysis for the assessment of the efficiency and ranking of the examined units. In addition to these computational approaches this paper in order to overcome these problems applies bootstrap techniques. Moreover it provides an application evaluating the performance of 23 Greek manufacturing sectors with the use of financial data. The results reveal that in the first stage of our sensitivity analysis the efficiencies obtained are biased. However, after applying the bootstrap techniques the sensitivity analysis reveals that the efficiency scores have been significantly improved.Performance measurement; Data Envelopment Analysis; Financial ratios; Bootstrap; Bias correction

The Productivity Slowdown, Measurement Issues, and the Explosion of Computer Power

macroeconomics, Productivity Slowdown, Measurement Issues, Computer Power

MNEs, internationalization of R&D and the impact on local firms: Evidence from China's high-tech industries.

This study examines the impact of FDI and foreign-owned Research and Development (R&D) on total factor productivity (TFP) of domestic firms in China's high-tech industries. Growth in local firm's TFP is modeled as being dependent on the local firm's distance in technology space to foreign affiliates in the same industry, along with R&D, both foreign-owned and domestic. This model is tested on small-sampled industry-level data for China for the period of 1997-2003, using a within estimator, panel data approach. The results show that the technology gap has a significantly positive relation to the improvement of domestic TFP growth productivity at the industry level. However, we do not find strong positive effect of foreign-owned R&D on improving local productivity. Domestic firms' own R&D, by contrast, is a significant determinant for local industry's productivity enhancement.local total factor productivityData; Domestic; Estimator; Firms; Foreign-owned research and development; Foreign direct investment; Growth; Impact; Industries; Industry; Investment; Local total factor productivity; Model; Multinational enterprises; Panel data; Productivity; R&D; Research; Research and development; Space; Spillovers; Studies; Technology; Technology spillovers; Total factor productivity;

The Economic Impact of Connecticut's Information Technology Industry

information technology, economic impact, Tornqvist index

THE EFFECTS OF PRIVATIZATION AND INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIVE PRESSURE ON FIRMS’ PRICE-COST MARGINS: MICRO EVIDENCE FROM EMERGING ECONOMIES1

This paper uses representative firm level panel data of 1,701 Bulgarian and 2,047 Romanian manufacturing firms to estimate price-cost margins and to analyze how these are affected by privatization and increased competitive pressure. The estimation method used, which is based on Roeger (1995), deals with potential endogeneity problems that are associated with estimating firm performance, by making use of the properties of the primal and dual Solow residual. We find that privatization is associated with higher price-cost margins in both Bulgaria and Romania. Moreover, foreign owned firms have higher markups than domestic privatized firms. Our results suggest that the sequencing of reforms, such as demonopolization prior to privatization and the establishment of competition policy, may be important. In addition, our results give support to the idea that opening to trade has a disciplining effect on firms’ market power. We find that increased import penetration is associated with lower price-cost margins in sectors where product market concentration is relatively high. Our results can be of relevance for other emerging economies, such as China and Vietnam, which still have to undergo major privatization programs.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39989/3/wp603.pd