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,...

International supply chains require coordination of numerous activities across multiple countries and firms. We adapt a model of supply chains and apply it to an international trade setting. In each chain, the measure of tasks completed within a firm is determined by transaction costs and the...

Despite competition concerns over the increasing dominance of global corporations, many argue that productivity spillovers from multinationals to domestic firms justify pro- FDI policies. For the first time, we use firm-to-firm transaction data in a developed country to examine the impact of...

This paper empirically examines the effects of financial crises on the organization of production of multinational enterprises. We construct a panel of European multinational networks from 2003 through 2015. We use as a financial shock the increase in risk premia between August 2007 and July...

We conduct the first field experiment of a performance-contingent microfinance contract. A large food multinational wishes to help micro-distributors in its supply chain with the financing of a productive asset. Working with the firm in Kenya, we compare asset financing under a traditional debt...

We use the 2018-2019 U.S. trade war to examine how supply chains adjustments to a tariff cost shock affect imports and exports. Using confidential firm-trade linked data, we show that the decline in imports of tariffed goods was driven by discontinuations of U.S. buyer-foreign supplier...

Global supply chains have come under unprecedented stress as a result of US-China trade tensions, the Covid-19 pandemic, and geopolitical shocks. We document shifts in the pattern of US participation in global value chains over the last four decades, in terms of partner countries, products, and...

We estimate the effects of government spending along the supply chain using disaggregated U.S. government procurement data. We first identify sectoral public spending shocks and combine them with input-output tables to measure upstream and downstream exposure through the production network. We...

Forward-looking investments determine the resilience of firms' supply chains. Such investments confer externalities on other firms in the production network. We compare the equilibrium and optimal allocations in a general equilibrium model with an arbitrary number of vertical production tiers....

We document how supply-chain pressures, household inflation expectations, and firm pricing power interacted to induce the pandemic-era surge in consumer price inflation in the euro area. Initially, supply-chain pressures increased inflation through a cost-push channel and raised inflation...