On Measuring the Contribution of Entering and Exiting Firms to Aggregate Productivity Growth

The problem of assessing the impact of firm entry and exit on aggregate productivity growth is addressed. The proposed method overcomes some problems with currently proposed methods. The paper also addresses some of the problems involved in aggregating outputs and inputs when firms enter and exit so that the one output and one input aggregate productivity decompositions can be applied. It turns out that multilateral index number theory is useful in performing the aggregation of many outputs (inputs) into a single output (input).