Building evidence base for economic policy from plant level micro data

Completed

Energy Efficiency(Industry)
Other Cross-Cutting Technologies or Research(Environmental, social and economic impacts)

Basic and strategic applied research

SOCIAL SCIENCES (Economics and Econometrics)

Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Environmental dimensions)
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Other sociological economical and environmental impact of energy)

Dr R Martin
Centre for Economic Performance
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Standard

ESRC

01 June 2005

31 May 2006

12 months

£31,681

London

ESRC Energy

Dr R Martin, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Objectives not supplied

My overall research interest can be summarised by two broad questions: How can economic productivity be increased, both in industrialised and developing countries? How can these increases be realised while reducing and minimising any associated destruction of the natural environment? I am trying to address these questions building on my expertise, which is the econometric analysis of large firm and plant level datasets. I am also working on methodological aspects of this kind of research. Currently I am working on 3 major lines of research, some of which are direct extensions of my PhD work, others are new areas. Measurement of plant level TFP. I am addressing the following issues: How to measure TFP in imperfectly competitive markets, both if plant level prices are observed andnot observed? How to measure TFP if plant level investment but not plant level capital stocks are observed? What is the best way to handle endogeneity problems of factor input variables in all of these cases? International Productivity Comparisons at the plant level. What determines international productivity differences? An important hypothesis suggests it is differences in the competitive selection mechanism between productive and un-productive plants. To analyse this thoroughly we ideally would require access to plant level dataset with comprehensive data across countries. This is not possible because of data access restrictions. An alternative is to compute statisticsinformative on these issues in a consistent way in each country separately. I am currently involved invarious projects tryingtobuild and subsequently analyse such statistics. Building evidence base for environmental policy from plant level micro data. With the help of the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) I recently managed to merge the economic performance data of the UK plant census with detailed data on energy consumption by plants. Based on this dataset I am pursuing a number ofresearchlines trying to determinethe factors that drive differences in energy efficiency across plants and what policies might help to improve energy efficiency and thereby reduce environmental pollution.

10/11/09