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The Survey of Drinking Water Plants is conducted to provide Canadians with national and regional information related to the production of drinking water. The survey is a census of drinking water plants serving 300 or more people, and asks for information on volumes of water drawn and treated, treatment type, financial aspects of the operation, as well as raw (source) water quality.

Operation and maintenance (O&M) costs associated with the acquisition and treatment of water will vary by treatment technology, annual production volumes and the type of source water processed. This study analyzes the data collected by the 2007 Survey of Drinking Water Plants to illustrate how O&M costs vary by these factors.

This paper asks whether synergies or managerial discipline operates in different ways across small versus large plants to affect the likelihood of mergers. Our findings indicate that those characteristics which provide the type of synergies upon which ownership changes rely are important factors leading to plant-ownership changes across most size classes. The magnitudes, however, are different across plant-size classes, with synergies generally being more important in larger plants.

Foreign plants in all size classes are more likely to be taken over. The effective rates of control change differ much more in the small than in the larger size classes. Compared to domestic plants, multinational plants in the smaller size classes contain relatively more of the type of intangible capital that makes them attractive vehicles for the transmission of new knowledge via takeover.

This paper studies the impact that a small country joining a regional trade agreement, but particularly a small country, might be expected to gain from the exploitation of scale economies. It makes use of the experience of Canada when it entered into the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in the early 1990s.

It finds that there was a general increase in the pace of plant commodity specialization around the time of implementation of the Free Trade Agreement. At the time of the treaty, plant diversity was found to be higher in larger plants and in industries with assets that are associated with scope economies. Diversity was also higher in industries that had higher rates of tariff protection.

Over the 1980s and 1990s, plant diversity decreased with reductions in both U.S. and Canadian tariffs. And the decline was greater during the post FTA era than before, thereby suggesting that this treaty had an impact above and beyond that just engendered by the tariff reductions that were associated with it. The study also found that foreign-controlled plants tended to adjust more over the entire period.

There is much debate over whether agents form rational expectations of variables or whether they suffer from systematic errors in judgment. This paper estimates models for plant-level survey data in order to test rationality for those manufacturing plants that report expectations of capital expenditures. An advantage of using such data is that rationality is tested in markets where agents may not have knowledge of each others' expectations so strategic motives behind purposefully irrational forecasts are minimized. Statistical estimates and test results suggest that expectations may indeed be rational depending on size. That is to say that the larger a plant is, the more resources it can expend on forecasting its future needs. Thus, the statistical results in this paper validate, for the first time, a class of assumptions in the macroeconomic literature.

This paper studies changes in diversification of firms and plants since the early 1970s in the Canadian manufacturing sector. It finds that there has been a general increase in specialization of both firms and plants. Firms have been continuously reducing the span of industries in which they operate, particularly when the industries are unrelated. Commodity specialization has also occurred at the plant level; however, in contrast to industry specialization, the pace of commodity specialization increased emerged late in the period, around the time of implementation of the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States. Plant specialization increased most in those plants that moved most strongly into export markets.

This paper investigates the extent to which establishments in the Canadian manufacturing sector experience occupational skill shortages, and to the extent that they do, whether these shortages appear to act as impediments to advanced technology adoption. Plants adopting advanced technology report shortages, particularly when it comes to professionals, such as scientists and engineers, and to technical specialists. Whether these shortages pose labour-market problems depends very much on the solutions adapted by the establishments experiencing the shortages. This paper finds that labour shortages did not appear to block technology adoption since those establishments that reported shortages were also the most technologically advanced. Although they faced a greater need for skilled labour, they were able to solve their shortages.

The U.S. Manufacturing Plant Ownership Change Database (OCD) was constructed using plant-level data taken from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database (LRD). It contains data on all manufacturing plants that have experienced ownership change at least once during the period 1963-92. This paper reports the status of the OCD and discuss its research possibilities. For an empirical demonstration, data taken from the database are used to study the effects of ownership changes on plant closure.

This paper outlines the growth in advanced technology use that has taken place over the last decade in Canadian manufacturing establishments. It presents the percentage of plants that use any one of the advanced technologies studied and how this has changed between 1989 and 1998. It also investigates how growth rates in the 1990s have varied across different technologies in specific functional areas, such as design and engineering, fabrication, communications, and integration and control. In an attempt to discover how changes in technology use are related to certain plant characteristics, the paper then investigates whether the growth in technology use varies across plants that differ by size, nationality and industry. Multivariate analysis is used to investigate the joint effects of plant size, foreign ownership and industry on the incidence of technology adoption and how these effects have changed over the last decade.

The Survey of Drinking Water Plants is conducted to provide Canadians with national and regional information related to the production of drinking water. The survey is a census of drinking water plants serving 300 or more people, and asks for information on volumes of water drawn and treated, treatment type, financial aspects of the operation, as well as raw (source) water quality.

Operation and maintenance (O&M) costs associated with the acquisition and treatment of water will vary by treatment technology, annual production volumes and the type of source water processed. This study analyzes the data collected by the 2007 Survey of Drinking Water Plants to illustrate how O&M costs vary by these factors.

This paper asks whether synergies or managerial discipline operates in different ways across small versus large plants to affect the likelihood of mergers. Our findings indicate that those characteristics which provide the type of synergies upon which ownership changes rely are important factors leading to plant-ownership changes across most size classes. The magnitudes, however, are different across plant-size classes, with synergies generally being more important in larger plants.

Foreign plants in all size classes are more likely to be taken over. The effective rates of control change differ much more in the small than in the larger size classes. Compared to domestic plants, multinational plants in the smaller size classes contain relatively more of the type of intangible capital that makes them attractive vehicles for the transmission of new knowledge via takeover.

This paper studies the impact that a small country joining a regional trade agreement, but particularly a small country, might be expected to gain from the exploitation of scale economies. It makes use of the experience of Canada when it entered into the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in the early 1990s.

It finds that there was a general increase in the pace of plant commodity specialization around the time of implementation of the Free Trade Agreement. At the time of the treaty, plant diversity was found to be higher in larger plants and in industries with assets that are associated with scope economies. Diversity was also higher in industries that had higher rates of tariff protection.

Over the 1980s and 1990s, plant diversity decreased with reductions in both U.S. and Canadian tariffs. And the decline was greater during the post FTA era than before, thereby suggesting that this treaty had an impact above and beyond that just engendered by the tariff reductions that were associated with it. The study also found that foreign-controlled plants tended to adjust more over the entire period.

There is much debate over whether agents form rational expectations of variables or whether they suffer from systematic errors in judgment. This paper estimates models for plant-level survey data in order to test rationality for those manufacturing plants that report expectations of capital expenditures. An advantage of using such data is that rationality is tested in markets where agents may not have knowledge of each others' expectations so strategic motives behind purposefully irrational forecasts are minimized. Statistical estimates and test results suggest that expectations may indeed be rational depending on size. That is to say that the larger a plant is, the more resources it can expend on forecasting its future needs. Thus, the statistical results in this paper validate, for the first time, a class of assumptions in the macroeconomic literature.

This paper studies changes in diversification of firms and plants since the early 1970s in the Canadian manufacturing sector. It finds that there has been a general increase in specialization of both firms and plants. Firms have been continuously reducing the span of industries in which they operate, particularly when the industries are unrelated. Commodity specialization has also occurred at the plant level; however, in contrast to industry specialization, the pace of commodity specialization increased emerged late in the period, around the time of implementation of the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States. Plant specialization increased most in those plants that moved most strongly into export markets.

This paper investigates the extent to which establishments in the Canadian manufacturing sector experience occupational skill shortages, and to the extent that they do, whether these shortages appear to act as impediments to advanced technology adoption. Plants adopting advanced technology report shortages, particularly when it comes to professionals, such as scientists and engineers, and to technical specialists. Whether these shortages pose labour-market problems depends very much on the solutions adapted by the establishments experiencing the shortages. This paper finds that labour shortages did not appear to block technology adoption since those establishments that reported shortages were also the most technologically advanced. Although they faced a greater need for skilled labour, they were able to solve their shortages.

This paper outlines the growth in advanced technology use that has taken place over the last decade in Canadian manufacturing establishments. It presents the percentage of plants that use any one of the advanced technologies studied and how this has changed between 1989 and 1998. It also investigates how growth rates in the 1990s have varied across different technologies in specific functional areas, such as design and engineering, fabrication, communications, and integration and control. In an attempt to discover how changes in technology use are related to certain plant characteristics, the paper then investigates whether the growth in technology use varies across plants that differ by size, nationality and industry. Multivariate analysis is used to investigate the joint effects of plant size, foreign ownership and industry on the incidence of technology adoption and how these effects have changed over the last decade.

The U.S. Manufacturing Plant Ownership Change Database (OCD) was constructed using plant-level data taken from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database (LRD). It contains data on all manufacturing plants that have experienced ownership change at least once during the period 1963-92. This paper reports the status of the OCD and discuss its research possibilities. For an empirical demonstration, data taken from the database are used to study the effects of ownership changes on plant closure.