Real value-added per employee in U.S. manufacturing fell between 2010 and 2016. Manufacturing accounted for over half the drop in private economy productivity growth between 1990-2000 and 2010-2016, though it accounted for less than 20% of aggregate value-added. While productivity growth fell in...

We propose two perspectives on U.S. manufacturing job losses to countries in Asia in 1990-2011: production cost arbitrage and the management of supply-demand mismatch. In our model, a firm facing demand uncertainty decides between investing in domestic or overseas production capacity. The model...

Though U.S. manufacturing output recovered more slowly from the Great Recession than historical experience would have predicted, manufacturing employment, which peaked in 1979, grew between 2010 and 2017. This was the second-longest period of employment growth in the entire post-war period....

Recent pre-crisis growth accounting exercises attribute strong productivity growth toincreased investments in information and communication technologies (ICT), especiallyduring the mid-1990s. EU-wide stylized facts about a growing US-EU productivity gapare confirmed for Germany, particularly...

Production capital and technology, fundamental to understanding output and productivity growth, are unobserved except at disaggregated levels and must be estimated prior to being used in empirical analysis. We develop and apply a new estimation method, based on advances in economics, statistics,...

This paper analyzes research efficiency at the industry level in manufacturing for 13 European member and four nonmember countries during 2000 and 2004. A unique dataset was compiled that matches patent applications at the European Patent Office (EPO) to industry-specific R&D inputs from EU...

This paper examines the role of international trade in the reallocation of U.S. manufacturing activity within and across industries from 1977 to 1997. It introduces a new measure of industry exposure to international trade, motivated by the Heckscher-Ohlin model, which focuses on where imports...

This paper quantifies the welfare effects of a change in the nominal exchange rate using the example of the beer market. I estimate a structural econometric model that makes it possible to compute manufacturers’ and retailers’ pass-through of a nominal exchange-rate change, without observing...

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...