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Prices, Profits, Proxies, and Production

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  • Victor H. Aguiar
  • Nail Kashaev
  • Roy Allen

Abstract

This paper studies nonparametric identification and counterfactual bounds for heterogeneous firms that can be ranked in terms of productivity. Our approach works when quantities and prices are latent, rendering standard approaches inapplicable. Instead, we require observation of profits or other optimizing-values such as costs or revenues, and either prices or price proxies of flexibly chosen variables. We extend classical duality results for price-taking firms to a setup with discrete heterogeneity, endogeneity, and limited variation in possibly latent prices. Finally, we show that convergence results for nonparametric estimators may be directly converted to convergence results for production sets.

Suggested Citation

  • Victor H. Aguiar & Nail Kashaev & Roy Allen, 2018. "Prices, Profits, Proxies, and Production," Papers 1810.04697, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2022.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1810.04697
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    Cited by:

    1. Florian Gunsilius, 2019. "A path-sampling method to partially identify causal effects in instrumental variable models," Papers 1910.09502, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2020.

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    JEL classification:

    • C5 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling
    • D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity

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