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...

Producer services such as managerial and engineering consulting can provide domestic firms with the substantial benefits of specialized knowledge that would be costly in terms of both time and money for domestic firms to develop on their own. These intermediate services are often non-traded, or...

This paper explores the role of knowledge flows and productivity growth by linking direct survey data on knowledge flows to firm-level data on TFP growth. Our data measure the information flows often considered important, especially by policy-makers, such as from within the firm and from...

Trade in business services has been attracting attention from academic researchers, policy makers, and business journalists. While there are many anecdotes, there has been little in the way of formal theory applied to this issue. In this paper, we adapt a general model of fragmentation of...

The practice of sourcing service inputs from overseas suppliers has been growing in response to new technologies that have made it possible to trade in some business and computing services that were previously considered non-tradable. This paper estimates the effects of offshoring on...

Manufacturing in high-income countries is on the decline and Denmark is no exception. Manufacturing employment and the number of firms have been shrinking as a share of the total and in absolute levels. This paper uses a rich linked employer-employee dataset to examine this decline from 1994 to...

We document the evolution of the newly created market for frequency response within the UK electricity system over a six-year period. Firms competed in price while facing considerable initial uncertainty about market demand and rival behavior. We show that over time prices stabilized, converging...

The nature of the relationship between employers and employees has been changing over the last decades, with firms increasingly relying on contractors, temp agencies and franchises rather than hiring employees directly. We investigate the impact of this transformation on the wage structure by...