Dissertation Research: Measurement of Productivity in Car Assembly Plants

本研究在三个重要方面不同于其他研究，记录或解释在工厂或企业层面的生产力差异。首先，企业应该将其生产过程分为两个阶段。在第一阶段，公司决定建造哪种类型的工厂。这一选择将主要影响最终的配置效率。在第二阶段，公司实际上是根据之前建造的类型来操作工厂。这一阶段的表现可以理解为技术效率。估计过程反映了这些连续的选择。其次，通过用行业细节补充通常的投入和产出数据，可以获得更准确的生产率衡量标准。生产过程的知识不是用来直接得出结论，而是用来指定一个更复杂的生产模型。关注的是做出实际决策的变量。最后，生产力与生产结构并没有分离。相比之下，以前的研究已经为资本、劳动和中间投入指定了一个投入聚合函数，并增加了一个乘法希克斯中性生产率项。这里的技术效率取决于所选设备的类型。这种选择也可以被评估，并被解释为分配效率。

This study differs in three important aspects from other studies that document or explain productivity differences at the plant or firm level. First, firms are supposed to organize their production process in two stages. In the first stage, a firm decides what type of plant to build. This choice will mainly bear on the resulting allocative efficiency. In the second stage, a firm actually operates the plant conditional on the type built before. Performance in this stage can be interpreted as technical efficiency. The estimation procedure reflects these consecutive choices.Second, a more accurate measure of productivity is obtained by supplementing the usual data on inputs and outputs with industry detail. Knowledge of the production process is used not to derive conclusions directly but to specify a more sophisticated model of production. Focus is on variables the actual decisions are made over.Finally, productivity is not separated from the structure of production. In contrast previous studies have specified an input aggregator function for capital, labor and intermediate inputs, and added a multiplicative Hicks-neutral productivity term. Here technical efficiency is conditional on the type of plant chosen. That choice can be evaluated too and is interpreted as allocative efficiency.