Skip to main content

POID Research Seminar

Misallocation in firm production: A nonparametric analysis using procurement lotteries

Dave Donaldson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), joint work with Paul Carrillo, Dina Pomeranz and Monica Singhal


Tuesday 05 March 2024 11:00 - 12:00

This event is both online and in person

SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

About this event

This paper develops new tools to study misallocation that do not require assumptions about the heterogeneity of firms’ technologies. We show how features of the distribution of marginal products can be identified from exogenous variation in firms’ input use and used both to test for misallocation and to quantify its resulting welfare losses. We apply this method to a setting with exogenous demand shocks from public procurement contracts for construction services in Ecuador. Our results reject the null of efficiency but our estimates of the resulting welfare losses from misallocation are small.


Participants are expected to adhere to the Events Code of Conduct.


This event will take place in SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.

The building is labelled SAL on the map. Enter the building via Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Campus
LSE Campus Map