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Economics

Selected Works

Productivity

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Full-Text Articles in Architecture

Regional Industrial Structure And Agglomeration Economies: An Analysis Of Productivity In Three Manufacturing Industries., Joshua Drucker, Edward Feser Dec 2011

Regional Industrial Structure And Agglomeration Economies: An Analysis Of Productivity In Three Manufacturing Industries., Joshua Drucker, Edward Feser

Joshua Drucker

We investigate whether a more concentrated regional industrial structure – the dominance of a few large firms in a given industry in a region – limits agglomeration economies and ultimately diminishes the economic performance of firms in that industry, especially small ones. In an application to three industries using establishment-level production functions and a combination of confidential and publicly available data sources, we find a consistently negative and substantial direct productivity effect associated with regional industrial structure concentration and only mixed and relatively weak evidence that agglomeration economies are a mediating factor in that effect.

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How Does Size Matter? Investigating The Relationships Among Plant Size, Industrial Structure, And Manufacturing Productivity., Joshua Drucker Dec 2010

How Does Size Matter? Investigating The Relationships Among Plant Size, Industrial Structure, And Manufacturing Productivity., Joshua Drucker

Joshua Drucker

Industrial concentration and market power have been studied extensively at the national scale, in fields ranging from economics and industrial organization to regional science and economic development. At the regional scale, however, industrial structure and firm size relationships have received little attention outside of non-generalizable case studies, primarily because accurate measurements require difficult-to-obtain plant- or firm-level information. Readily available secondary data sources on establishment size distributions (such as County Business Patterns or the Census of Manufactures) cannot be linked to performance information for particular establishments or firms. Yet region-specific industrial structure may be a crucial determinant of firm performance and …

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The Development And Testing Of A Purchasing Power Parity Method For Comparing Construction Costs Internationally, Rick Best Jun 2008

The Development And Testing Of A Purchasing Power Parity Method For Comparing Construction Costs Internationally, Rick Best

Rick Best

Over the past fifty to sixty years there have been numerous attempts to compare the performance of the construction industries of different countries. In almost all cases the cost of construction has been an important, sometimes the single parameter Cost performance has sometimes been equated to productivity, and productivity measurement and comparison is attempted by governments and their agencies on a regular basis.

Fundamental to these exercises has been the necessity to bring construction costs in different national currencies to a common base. This is imperative as amounts in different currencies cannot be directly compared.

Money market exchange rates do …

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