The rapid growth of offshoring has sparked a contentious debate over its impact on the U.S. manufacturing sector, which has recorded steep employment declines yet strong output growth--a fact reconciled by the notable gains in manufacturing productivity. We maintain, however, that the dramatic...

We analyze two reasons for export prices to be different across markets--namely, quality differentiation and variable markups--and attempt to parse their relative importance and some of their underlying drivers. To overcome the substantial measurement issues in this task, we consider a...

This paper investigates the propensity of exporters in certain primary commodity sectors to innovate and then attempts to measure the associated gains. The high degree of differentiation in metal products is giving rise to the potential for vertical upgrading for a substantial portion of Latin...

We analyze the decline in the U.S. share of world merchandise exports against the backdrop of a model-based measure of competitiveness. We preliminarily use constant market share analysis and gravity estimations to show that the majority of the decline in export shares can be associated with a...

This paper introduces new estimates of recent productivity developments in the United States, using an appropriate theoretical framework for aggregating industry MFP to sectors and the total economy. Our work sheds light on the sources of the continued strong performance of U.S. productivity...

J31, J50, L10 </AbstractSection> Copyright Abowd et al.; licensee Springer. 2012