This paper reviews research that uses longitudinal microdata to document productivity movements and to examine factors behind productivity growth. The research explores the dispersion of productivity across firms and establishments, the persistence of productivity differentials, the consequences of entry and exit, and the contribution of resource reallocation across firms to aggregate productivity growth. The research also reveals important factors correlated with productivity growth, such as managerial ability, technology use, human capital, and regulation. The more advanced literature in the field has begun to address the more difficult questions of the causality between these factors and productivity growth.

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A common result from altering several fundamental assumptions of the neoclassical investment model with convex adjustment costs is that investment may occur in lumpy episodes. This paper takes a step back and asks "How lumpy is investment?" We answer this question by documenting the distributions of investment and capital adjustment for a sample of over 13,700 manufacturing plants drawn from over 300 four-digit industries. We find that many plants do undergo large investment episodes; however, there is tremendous variation across plants in their capital accumulation patterns. This paper explores how the variation in capital accumulation patterns vary by observable plant and firm characteristics, and how large investment episodes at the plant level transmit into fluctuations in aggregate investment. (Copyright: Elsevier)