Discussion Paper
The Anatomy of French Production Hierarchies
We use a comprehensive dataset of French manufacturing firms to study their internal organization. We first divide the employees of each firm into ‘layers’ using occupational categories. Layers are hierarchical in that the typical worker in a higher layer earns more, and the typical firm occupies less of them. In addition, the probability of adding (dropping) a layer is very positively (negatively) correlated with value added.