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...

Standard models suggest that adverse labor demand shocks will lead to bigger employment losses if institutional factors like minimum wages and trade unions prevent downward wage adjustments. Some economists have argued that this insight explains the contrast between the United States, where real...

The County Business Pattern ("CBP") files contain employment and establishment counts for detailed industry codes covering all counties in the United States. The contribution of this project is to digitize, clean, and prepare the CBP files from 1946-1974. We also apply the methods developed in...

Should the national government undertake policies aimed at strengthening the economies of particular localities or regions? Agglomeration economies and human capital spillovers suggest that such policies could enhance welfare. However, the mere existence of agglomeration externalities does not...

"Changes in technologies for reproducing and redistributing digital goods (e.g., music, movies, software, books) have dramatically affected profitability of these goods, and raised concerns for future development of socially valuable digital products. However, broader illegitimate distribution...

"We identify a new set of stylized facts on the 2008-2009 trade collapse that we hope can be used to shed light on the importance of demand and supply-side factors in explaining the fall in trade. In particular, we decompose the fall in international trade into product entry and exit, price...

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...