This article documents a rapid shift toward services (tertiarization) of the Chinese economy since 2005, as evidenced by the significant increase in both employment and value-added shares of the service sector. Notably, our analysis reveals that a variety of measures of productivity growth have been greater in the service sector than in the manufacturing sector. Firm-level measures of dynamism corroborate this ongoing tertiarization trend, which is not limited to services used as inputs to industrial production but extends also to consumer services. These findings are robust across different growth accounting methodologies, including a recently proposed method by Fan et al. (2023) that addresses challenges associated with the measurement of quality improvements in service industries.
The role of demand curvature in determining firm behavior in symmetric oligopolistic product markets is well-understood. We consider the empirically relevant discrete choice differentiated product demand and point to two forces that drive curvature in logit demand: the impact of outside-good spending on the consumer’s indirect utility and the heterogeneity in this response across consumers. We use the canonical example of the ready-to-eat cereal market (Nevo, 2000) to contrast elasticity and curvature estimates across several workhorse models. We illustrate that the log-concave Multinomial Logit and Nested Logit demands yield significantly biased curvature estimates. In contrast, a Mixed Logit specification generates a wider range of curvatures, including curvatures larger than one. These results are of immediate relevance to the robust assessment of tax incidence and the pass-through of cost savings, such as from a horizontal merger, in differentiated product markets.
We analyze the consequences of noisy information aggregation for investment. Market imperfections create endogenous rents that cause overinvestment in upside risks and underinvestment in downside risks. In partial equilibrium, these inefficiencies are particularly severe if upside risks are coupled with easy scalability of investment. In general equilibrium, the shareholders' collective attempts to boost value of individual firms leads to a novel externality operating through price that amplifies investment distortions with downside risks but offsets distortions with upside risks.
We propose a new sorting framework: composite sorting. Composite sorting comprises of (1) distinct worker types assigned to the same occupation, and (2) a given worker type simultaneously being part of both positive and negative sorting. Composite sorting arises when fixed investments mitigate variable costs of mismatch. We completely characterize optimal sorting and additionally show it is more positive when mismatch costs are less concave. We then characterize equilibrium wages. Wages have a regional hierarchical structure − relative wages depend solely on sorting within skill groups. Quantitatively, composite sorting can generate a sizable portion of within-occupations wage dispersion in the US.
This paper identifies a set of possible regulations that could be used both to make the search market more competitive and simultaneously ameliorate the harms flowing from Google’s current monopoly position. The purpose of this paper is to identify conceptual problems and solutions based on sound economic principles and to begin a discussion from which robust and specific policy recommendations can be drafted.