Food manufacturing and processing is an important link between agricultural producers and consumers in the agricultural supply chain. The food manufacturing sector in the United States is both increasingly mechanized and increasingly concentrated. Consequently, labor risks in food manufacturing...

This paper studies how firm failures and the resulting disruptions to supply chains can amplify negative shocks. We develop a non-competitive model where customized supplier-customer relations increase productivity, and the relationship-specific surplus generated between firms and their...

Supply chain disruptions, which have become commonplace, are often associated with globalization and trade. Little is known about optimal policy in the face of insecure supply chains. Should governments promote resilience by subsidizing backup sources of input supply? Should they encourage firms...

Covid-19 highlighted the weaknesses in the supply chain. Many have argued that a more resilient or robust supply chain is needed. But what does a robust supply chain mean? And how do firms' decisions change when taken that approach? This paper studies a very stylized model of a supply chain,...

Recent supply disruptions catapulted the issue of risk in global supply chains (GSCs) to the top of policy agendas and created the impression that shortages would have been less severe if GSCs were either shorter and more domestic, or more diversified. But is this right? We start our answer by...

We use a detailed micro dataset on product availability to construct a direct high-frequency measure of consumer product shortages during the 2020-2021 pandemic. We document a widespread multi-fold rise in shortages in nearly all sectors early in the pandemic. Over time, the composition of...

This paper analyzes the impact of exchange rate risk on global food supply chains. Although the theoretical literature suggests ambivalence regarding the sign and magnitude of this effect, most empirical studies indicate a negative association between exchange rate volatility and international...

The food supply chain has experienced major disruptions from both demand and supply sides during the Covid-19 pandemic. While some consequences such as food waste are directly caused by the disruption due to supply chain inefficiency, others are indirectly caused by a change in consumer's...

Supply chains for many agricultural products have an hour-glass shape; in between a sizable number of farmers and consumers is a smaller number of processors. The concentrated nature of the meat processing sectors in the United States implies that disruption of the processing capacity of any one...