The Slow Growth of New Plants: Learning about Demand?
研究发现新企业规模小且增长慢并非因为生产率低，而是需求侧因素所致；通过动态模型估计，企业过去的生产决策驱动的主动需求积累比被动积累更重要。
It is well known that new businesses are typically much smaller than their established industry competitors, and that this size gap closes slowly. We show that even in commodity-like product markets, these patterns do not reflect productivity gaps, but rather show differences in demand-side fundamentals. We document and explore patterns in plants’ idiosyncratic demand levels by estimating a dynamic model of plant expansion in the presence of a demand accumulation process (e.g. building a customer base). We find that active accumulation driven by plants’ past production decisions quantitatively dominates passive demand accumulation, and that within-firm spillovers affect demand levels but not growth.