Econometrics for the Firm (FIRMMETRIX)

本提案所描述的研究将通过对企业生产过程和相互作用的实证评估来解决现有的挑战。企业的决策和相互作用是当前关于诸如不平等、市场力量、生产率和宏观经济波动起源等重要主题的辩论的背景。企业行为的主要驱动因素的量化是这些争论中许多指标的关键因素。因此，确定企业投入和产出与其市场行为之间的因果关系是至关重要的，因为这里的不精确性将引导对那些重大社会主题的结论。然而，(a)从传统数据估计生产可能性的现代程序依赖于企业如何以及何时选择可能不可靠地推动估计的投入的关键假设；(b)重要的多公司谈判模型缺乏对其实证有效性的数据要求的明确指导；(c)系统的市场定义协议——研究和竞争政策的关键——仍然是一个挑战。该提案为解决这些问题提供了突破性的研究。该提案纳入了新的和越来越多的可用数据，以解决上述问题；开发必要的工具，以应对这些新数据带来的计量经济学挑战；并通过实际应用展示了这种方法的帮助。该提案涵盖了在四个相互补充和建立的工作流中分析企业互动模型的方法论考虑和实证应用。工作流程将：(i)在两个不同的工作流程中纳入有关公司期望和业务网络的数据，以解决(a)项中的问题；（ii）正式探讨准确评估(b)中提到的企业间关系模型所需的数据；（iii）结合机器学习方法和市场细分经济学来解决(c)。

The research this proposal describes will tackle existing challenges with the empirical assessment of firms' production processes and interactions. Firms' decisions and interactions lie in the background of the current debate on important themes such as inequality, market power, productivity, and the origins of macroeconomic fluctuations. The quantification of the main drivers of firms' behaviour is a key ingredient to many metrics colouring those debates. The identification of the causal links between firms' inputs and outputs and their market behaviour is thus fundamental as imprecisions here will steer conclusions on those big societal themes. Yet, (a) modern procedures to estimate production possibilities from conventional data rest on critical assumptions on how and when firms choose inputs that may unreliably drive estimates; (b) important multi-firm negotiation models lack clear guidelines on the data requirements for their empirical validity; and (c) systematic market definition protocols - key for research and competition policy - remain a challenge. This proposal offers ground-breaking research addressing these issues.The proposal incorporates new and increasingly available data to address the issues above; develops the necessary tools to take on the econometric challenges that these new data bring; and shows through substantive applications how this approach helps. The proposal covers methodological considerations and empirical applications on the analysis of firm interaction models in four workstreams that complement and build on one another. The workstreams will: (i) incorporate data on firm expectations and business networks to address the issues in (a) in two separate workstreams; (ii) formally explore the data demands for the accurate assessment of firm-to-firm relationship models noted in (b); (iii) and bring together machine learning methods and economics for market segmentation to address (c).