Since 1977, and in some cases starting before that, most East Asian countries' export patterns in manufacturing have been transformed from industry distributions typical of developing countries to distributions more like those of advanced countries. The process of change in most cases started...

Within Japanese multinational firms, parent exports from Japan to a foreign region are positively related to production in that region by affiliates of that parent, given the parent's home production in Japan and the region's size and income level. This relationship is similar to that found for...

Despite the persistent fears that production abroad by U.S. multinationals reduces employment at home, there has, in fact, been almost no aggregate shift of production or employment to foreign countries. Some continuing shifts to foreign locations by U.S. manufacturing firms have been largely...

We quantify and study state-level economic policy uncertainty. Tapping digital archives for nearly 3,500 local newspapers, we construct three monthly indexes for each state: one that captures state and local sources of policy uncertainty (EPU-S), one that captures national and international...

COVID-19 drove a mass social experiment in working from home (WFH). We survey more than 30,000 Americans over multiple waves to investigate whether WFH will stick, and why. Our data say that 20 percent of full workdays will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5...

About one-fifth of paid workdays will be supplied from home in the post-pandemic economy, and more than one-fourth on an earnings-weighted basis. In view of this projection, we consider some implications of home internet access quality, exploiting data from the new Survey of Working Arrangements...

We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck. Both the one-year VIX and our survey-based measure of firm-level...

While the U.S. and Sweden both lost more than 20 per cent of their shares of world and developed countries' exports of manufactures over the 15 years or so after the mid-1960's, the export shares of their multinational firms stayed fairly stable or even increased. The multinationals, while first...

The U.S. economy's nonfinancial debt ratio has risen since 1980 to a level that is extraordinary in comparison with prior historical experience. Approximately one-half of this rise has consisted of increased indebtedness (relative to income) of borrowers in the economy's private sector,...