Intra-Industry Heterogeneity and the Great Depression: The American Motor Vehicles Industry, 1929–1935
利用新发现的工厂级面板数据，研究大萧条期间美国汽车工业的就业、产出和生产率变化，发现大量关闭工厂与持续运营工厂差异显著，且产出并未向低成本生产者转移，揭示了产业组织与宏观经济的联系。
Reliance on a “representative firm” approach in studying industrial behavior during the Great Depression obscures economically interesting patterns. A newly discovered data source lets us form and study an establishment-level panel dataset on the motor vehicles industry, one of the largest in 1929. Substantial intraindustry heterogeneity led to large composition effects in employment, output, and productivity: the large number of plants that shut down were unlike the continuing ones. Oddly, output does not seem to have shifted among continuing producers to the relatively low-cost ones. Reconciling these should illuminate links between industrial organization and macroeconomics.