Unraveling Firms: Demand, Productivity and Markups Heterogeneity
提出一个同时估计企业需求、数量全要素生产率和加成率异质性的框架，利用比利时企业数据发现数量生产率与需求负相关，并揭示企业应对中国进口竞争时收入生产率变化的复杂机制。
Abstract We develop a novel framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, quantity total factor productivity and markups across firms while leaving the correlation between the three dimensions unrestricted. We accomplish this by explicitly introducing demand heterogeneity and systematically exploiting assumptions used in previous productivity estimation approaches. In doing so, we provide an exact decomposition of revenue productivity in terms of the underlying heterogeneities, thus bridging the gap between quantity and revenue productivity estimations. We use Belgian firms’ production data to quantify total factor productivity, demand and markups, and show how they are correlated with each other across time and with measures obtained from other approaches. In doing so, we find quantity total factor productivity and demand to be strongly negatively correlated with each other, so suggesting a trade-off between the quality of a firm’s products and their production cost. We also show how our framework provides deeper and sharper insights on the response of firms to increasing import competition from China. In particular, we find that changes in revenue productivity materialise as the outcome of complex and sometimes offsetting changes in quantity total factor productivity, demand, markups and production scale.