Australia’s productivity performance is characterized by important differences across continuing firms, frequent entry of new firms, and substantial exit of firms which, for one reason or another, decide to cease production. These basic facts call into question the appropriateness of measuring productivity using an aggregate production function that is based upon a representative firm. This study relaxes the standard assumptions that industries are comprised of a set of homogeneous firms, the set of which are constant over time. Instead, we apply a semi-parametric production to continue production. The model controls for the relationship between productivity shocks and input choices and the inter-relationship between these and the decision to continue production. Using the Business Longitudinal Survey we estimate an improved set of production functions for twenty-five two-digit industries in Australia. We use these results to examine aggregate industry-level productivity performance. We use a new aggregation method in calculating these changes which allows us to separate productivity changes and output composition changes which sheds new light on industry-level productivity performance in Australia.
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Paper provided by Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number
545.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Capital and Total Factor Productivity; Capacity L20 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - General C14 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Semiparametric and Nonparametric Methods
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