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Equation 3 · Part 11 · Selection Accounting: The Price Equation Runs the Economy

addition

Δzˉ=Cov⁡s(wi,zi)wˉ+Es[wi Δzi]wˉ\Delta \bar z = \frac{\operatorname{Cov}_s(w_i, z_i)}{\bar w} + \frac{\mathbb{E}_s[w_i \, \Delta z_i]}{\bar w}
addition

What this part means

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

Its job in the formula

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

The passage around this formula

Price’s identity, applied to firms with market shares sis_i and log-productivity values ziz_i , reads: Δzˉ=Cov⁡s(wi,zi)wˉ+Es[wi Δzi]wˉ\Delta \bar z = \frac{\operatorname{Cov}_s(w_i, z_i)}{\bar w} + \frac{\mathbb{E}_s[w_i \, \Delta z_i]}{\bar w}. The change in mean log productivity splits into a covariance between a firm’s relative fitness — its share-growth factor wiw_i — and its productivity, plus a share-weighted average of each firm’s own productivity change, weighted by how much it grew. The first term is selection: value reallocated toward whoever is already ahead. The second is transmission: value created inside units that already exist. This holds for any partition of any economy in any period. It is exact bookkeeping, not a behavioral model, and it carries no error term to hide behind.

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Learn the underlying idea

Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.

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Sources cited in the article section

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