Patterns of Plant Adjustment

Analyzing the impact of investment spikes on dynamic productivity growth

“…Power (1998) and Letterie et al (2010) also reported no productivity gains due to investment spikes in their studies undertaken in the static productivity context. Our results on the impact of investments spikes on productivity change are also similar to these documented in Huggett and Ospina (2001), Sakellaris (2004) and Geylani and Stefanou (2013), however we do not find the productivity recovery after some time passes following the investment spike.…”

“…Nilsen et al (2009) find only very small changes in labor productivity associated with investment spikes, suggesting that productivity improvements are not related to technological change through investment spikes. Sakellaris (2004) and Huggett and Ospina (2001) find that investment spike episodes lead to productivity falling after the investment spike, which starts to recover slowly in the US and Columbian manufacturing plants, respectively. Licandro et al (2003) for Spanish manufacturing firms find that expansionary and innovative type of investment spike increase the firms' productivity after the spike, however long learning curves are associated with innovative investment.…”

Can technical change exacerbate the effects of labor market sclerosis?

“…Doms and Dunne (1998) find that most plant-level investment occurs in widely spaced 'lumps' that occur roughly every 6 years on average. The results of Cooley et al (1997), Cooper et al (1999 and Sakellaris (2004) suggest that these lumps reflect plant-wide reorganization as new technologies are adopted. Moreover, Dunne et al (1989) find that about 40% of plants do not appear to survive for 5 years.…”

“…1 shows an almost uniform increase in the investment share of IT across industrialized economies over the past two decades. In turn, recent empirical and theoretical work finds that an important factor of plant dynamics is the process of technology adoption -see for example Cooley et al (1997), Cooper et al (1999), and Sakellaris (2004). Establishment-level employment may thus depend on technology adoption.…”

Effects of Motor Carriers’ Growth or Contraction on Safety: A Multiyear Panel Analysis

“…Thus, our hypotheses do not posit directional predictions; rather, they suggest more nuanced predictions regarding differences in the magnitude of regression coefficients across the two safety constructs. The theory we develop can be categorized as middle range (Merton 1968;Stank et al 2017) in that we draw on core principles from more general theories of nonscale free capabilities (Penrose 2009;Levinthal and Wu 2010;Knudsen et al 2014) and adjustment costs (Lichtenberg 1988;Hamermesh and Pfann 1996;Sakellaris 2004), and apply these concepts to our research setting. We apply top-down theoretical contextualization (Craighead et al 2016) to incorporate nuances from the motor carrier industry to provide contextual details to explain why the theorized effects are expected (Astbury and Leeuw 2010).…”