• DOI:10.2139/ssrn.3871235
• Corpus ID: 212726471

Prices, Profits, Proxies, and Production

@inproceedings{Aguiar2018PricesPP,
  title={Prices, Profits, Proxies, and Production},
  author={Victor H. Aguiar and Nail Kashaev and Roy Evan Allen},
  booktitle={SSRN Electronic Journal},
  year={2018}
}

• Victor H. Aguiar, N. Kashaev, R. Allen
• Published in SSRN Electronic Journal 10 October 2018
• Economics

This paper studies nonparametric identification and counterfactual bounds for heterogeneous firms that can be ranked in terms of productivity. Our approach works when quantities and prices are latent rendering standard approaches inapplicable. Instead, we require observation of profits or other optimizing-values such as costs or revenues, and either prices or price proxies of flexibly chosen variables. We extend classical duality results for price-taking firms to a setup with discrete heterogeneity, endogeneity, and limited variation in possibly latent prices. Finally, we show that convergence results for nonparametric estimators may be directly converted to convergence results for production sets.