No abstract

We introduce a new method for conditioning out serially correlated unobserved shocks to the production technology by building ideas first developed in Olley and Pakes (1996). Olley and Pakes show how to use investment to control for correlation between input levels and the unobserved firmspecific productivity process. We prove that like investment, intermediate inputs (those inputs which are typically subtracted out in a value-added production function) can also solve this simultaneity problem. We highlight three potential advantages to using an intermediate inputs approach relative to investment. Our results indicate that these advantages are empirically important.

We add to the methods for conditioning out serially correlated unobserved shocks to the production technology. We build on ideas first developed in Olley and Pakes (1996). They show how to use investment to control for correlation between input levels and the unobserved firm-specific productivity process. We show that intermediate inputs (those inputs which are typically subtracted out in a value-added production function) can also solve this simultaneity problem. We discuss some theoretical benefits of extending the proxy choice set in this direction and our empirical results suggest these benefits can be important.

In this paper, we consider how rich sources of information on consumer choice can help to identify demand parameters in a widely used class of differentiated products demand models. Most important, we show how to use "second-choice" data on automotive purchases to obtain good estimates of substitution patterns in the automobile industry. We use our estimates to make out-of-sample predictions about important recent changes in industry structure.We thank numerous seminar participants, two referees, and the editors Lars Hansen and John Cochrane for helpful suggestions. We also thank the National Science Foundation for financial support, through grants 9122672, 9512106, and 9617887. We are particularly grateful to G.

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Poor sanitation contributes to morbidity and mortality in the developing world, but there is disagreement on what policies can increase sanitation coverage. To measure the effects of alternative policies on investment in hygienic latrines, we assigned 380 communities in rural Bangladesh to different marketing treatments-community motivation and information; subsidies; a supply-side market access intervention; and a control-in a cluster-randomized trial. Community motivation alone did not increase hygienic latrine ownership (+1.6 percentage points, P = 0.43), nor did the supply-side intervention (+0.3 percentage points, P = 0.90). Subsidies to the majority of the landless poor increased ownership among subsidized households (+22.0 percentage points, P < 0.001) and their unsubsidized neighbors (+8.5 percentage points, P = 0.001), which suggests that investment decisions are interlinked across neighbors. Subsidies also reduced open defecation by 14 percentage points (P < 0.001).

The authors evaluate the voluntary export restraint that was initially placed on exports of automobiles from Japan in 1981. They evaluate the impact this policy had on U.S. consumer welfare, firm profits, and foregone tariff revenue from its initiation through 1990.

It has long been believed that international competition forces domestic finns to behave more competitively. I term this the imports-as--market-discipline hypothesis. I construct a simple static oligopoly model and estimate the model using panel data from Turkish manufacturing firms. The data span the course of a dramatic trade liberalization. Looking for changes in price-marginal cost markups as trade policy shifts, I test the imports-as-market discipline hypothesis. In all five industries to which the hypothesis is relevant, markups change in the direction predicted by the theory. These changes are statistically significant in all but one of the five industries.