The Sources of Capital Misallocation

J. David,Venky Venkateswaran

Published 2019 in The American Economic Review

ABSTRACT

We develop a methodology to disentangle sources of capital “mis-allocation,” i.e., dispersion in value-added/capital. It measures the contributions of technological/informational frictions and a rich class of firm-specific factors. An application to Chinese manufacturing firms reveals that adjustment costs and uncertainty, while significant, explain only a modest fraction of the dispersion, which stems largely from other factors: a component correlated with productivity and a fixed effect. Adjustment costs are more salient for large US firms, though other factors still account for the bulk of the dispersion. Technological/markup heterogeneity explains a limited fraction in China, but a potentially large share in the United States. (JEL D22, D24, D25, E22, G31, L60, O11, O14, O47, P31)

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-48 of 48 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-100 of 205 citing papers · Page 1 of 3