This paper compares the performance of U.K. plants that were acquired by the foreign-owned sector during 1987-1992 with other comparable subgroups of plants operating at the same time (including plants acquired by U.K.-owned companies). The principal aim is to consider the types of plants that were acquired and whether after acquisition they performed above or below average when compared to other manufacturing plants. The results show that foreign-owned enterprises acquired the most-productive plants previously operated by U.K. enterprises. After acquisition, there is some evidence that productivity declined, which would be consistent with difficulties associated with assimilating these established plants into the new organization.

f [HE Austrian approach to production _ theory' provides a framework for treating intertemporal production problems that is quite different from contemporary methods. In the Austrian view, time and timing were the crucial aspects of production. Recently, Hicks (1973) has proposed an approach, which he terms Neo-Austrian, integrating the general intertemporal production model with the Austrian approach of viewing production as a process taking place through time.2 Allais (1965), long a proponent of such a view, has developed a model of such a process. In this article we develop anintertemporal production model capable of being implemented econometrically, and undertake some initial testing of the model at the aggregate level on U.S. data. The rest of the paper is as follows. In section II we present an intertemporal theory of competitive production and contrast it with the contemporary approach. In section III we specify our functional forms and estimating equations. In section IV we discuss our data, estimation procedure and results.

We assess the total factor productivity of 35,752 manufacturing establishments before and after management buyouts (MBOs). MBO plants are less productive than comparable plants before the transfer of ownership. They experience a substantial increase in productivity after a buyout, which appears to be due to measures undertaken by new owners to reduce the labor intensity of production, via outsourcing of intermediate goods and materials. These findings, which are pervasive across industries, imply that MBOs reduce agency costs and enhance economic efficiency. Our evidence is consistent with Jovanovic and Rousseau (2002), who suggest that ownership changes shift resources to more efficient uses and to better managers.