The Chicago Fed convened a series of conferences in 2003–04 to address the following three questions: What are the long-term underlying trends in manufacturing and have they fundamentally changed in recent years? Second, is the poor performance of recent years a transitory phenomenon? And,...

The Chicago Fed held a series of conferences in 2003–04 aimed at understanding the recent poor performance of the manufacturing sector in the Midwest and the nation and identifying the challenges that lie ahead.

This article estimates the extent to which the manufacturing sectors of U.S. metropolitan economies face competition from abroad and, in turn, how much they export overseas.

The introduction of a new manufacturing system provides a unique opportunity to analyze its effects on the governance structure of vertical relationships. This paper focuses on the possible effects of lean manufacturing on the decision to vertically integrate. Transaction cost theory provides...