The Impact of Plant-Level Resource Allocations and Technical Progress on U.S. Macroeconomic Growth

We build up from the plant level an aggregate(d) Solow residual by estimating every U.S. manufacturing plant's contribution to the change in aggregate final demand between 1976 and 1996. Our framework uses the Petrin and Levinsohn (2010) definition of aggregate productivity growth, which aggregates plant-level changes to changes in aggregate final demand in the presence of imperfect competition and other distortions/frictions. We decompose these...