Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a...

The cyclicality of real wages has important implications for the validity of competing business cycle theories. However, the empirical evidence on the aggregate level is inconclusive. Using a threshold vector autoregressive model for the US and Germany to condition the relationship between real...

Even before the Great Recession, U.S. employment growth was unimpressive. Between 2000 and 2007, the economy gave back the considerable employment gains achieved during the 1990s, with a historic contraction in manufacturing employment being a prime contributor to the slump. We estimate that...

In this paper we develop a multi-sector model of firms pricing behaviour under imperfect competition. We allow for the fact that some goods sold will be for final consumption, while others will be used as intermediate goods in further production. We assume that price setters are constrained by...

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,...

Manufacturing accounts for more than three-quarters of U.S. corporate patents. The competitive shock to this sector emanating from China's economic ascent could in theory either augment or stifle U.S. innovation. Using three decades of U.S. patents matched to corporate owners, we quantify how...

We empirically examine how import competition affects sentiment toward China in local communities in the United States using a news-based index for sentiment. Results are threefold. First, U.S. sentiment toward China peaked in 2007 before turning negative. Second, communities more exposed to...

We examine the comovements between the output indexes of three German sectors (manufacturing, mining, and agriculture) and the three corresponding sectoral stock market indexes. It is found that data with and without seasonal adjustment give mixed results on the long-run interaction between the...

The on-going "Make in India" campaign aims at manufacturing revival. Its characteristics resemble East Asian industrial reform and growth policies based on the flying-geese model which highlights "step-by-step" changes in a country's specialisation pattern and global competitiveness accompanied...