The County Business Patterns data published by the US Census Bureau track employment by county and industry from 1946 to the present. Two features of the data limit their usefulness to researchers in practice: (1) employment for the majority of county-industry cells is suppressed to protect...

We combine data on individual trade transactions from U.S. customs records with comprehensive information on firms' employment from the Census Bureau's business register to examine wholesalers and retailers in U.S. exports and imports. Exporters and importers with 100 percent employment in...

This paper provides and describes concordances between the ten-digit Harmonized System (HS) categories used to classify products in U.S. international trade and the four-digit SIC and six-digit NAICS industries that cover the years 1989 to 2006. We also provide concordances between ten-digit HS...

This paper: outlines an algorithm for concording U.S. ten-digit Harmonized System export and import codes over time; describes the concordances we construct for 1989 to 2004; and provides Stata code that can be used to construct similar concordances for arbitrary beginning and ending years from 1989...

Recent research in international trade emphasizes the importance of firms' extensive margins for understanding overall patterns of trade as well as how firms respond to specific events such as trade liberalization. In this paper, we use detailed U.S. trade statistics to provide a broad overview...

This paper provides an integrated view of globally engaged U.S. firms by exploring a newly developed dataset that links U.S. international trade transactions to longitudinal data on U.S. enterprises. These data permit examination of a number of new dimensions of firm activity, including how many...

This paper describes the updating of the NBER trade dataset, which now provides U.S. import and export values to the year 2001, disaggregated by Harmonized System (HS), Standard International Trade Classification (SITC), and the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) categories. In...

We examine the relationship between import competition from low wage countries and the reallocation of US manufacturing from 1977 to 1997. Both employment and output growth are slower for plants that face higher levels of low wage import competition in their industry. As a result, US...

Do New York and Nashville face the same pressures from increased trade? This paper considers the role of international trade in shaping the product mix and relative wages for regions within the US. Using the predictions from a Heckscher-Ohlin trade model, we ask whether all the regions in the US...

We use relatively unexplored dimensions of US microdata to examine how US manufacturing employment has evolved across industries, firms, establishments, and regions. We show that these data provide support for both trade- and technology-based explanations of the overall decline of employment...