This paper makes two methodological contributions. First, it proposes a framework to decompose total production activities at the country, sector, or country-sector level, to different types, depending on whether they are for pure domestic demand, traditional international trade, simple GVC...

We develop a property-rights model of the firm in which production entails a continuum of uniquely sequenced stages. In each stage, a final-good producer contracts with a distinct supplier for the procurement of a customized stage-specific component. Our model yields a sharp characterization for...

We estimate the long-term effect of public R&D on growth in manufacturing by analyzing new data from the Cold War era Space Race. We develop a novel empirical strategy that leverages US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending. Our results demonstrate that public R&D...

We develop a unified framework to trace value added along global supply chains in the presence of foreign direct investment by decomposing either GDP based on forward linkages or final production based on backward linkages. The new framework accounts for the presence of foreign invested...

This paper investigates the role of individual firms in international business cycle comovement using data covering the universe of French firm-level value added, bilateral imports and exports, and cross-border ownership over the period 1993-2007. At the micro level, controlling for firm and...

Recent studies document a decline in the share of labour and a simultaneous increase in the share of residual ('factorless') income in national GDP. We argue the need for study of factor incomes in cross-border production to complement country studies. We define a GVC production function that...

This paper presents experimental tables created by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis comparing industry-specific shares of the components of total output of globally engaged firms located in the United States that are part of a multinational enterprise with those of firms that are part of an...

This paper offers four contributions to the empirical literature on global value chains (GVCs). First, we provide a succinct overview of several measures developed to capture the upstreamness or downstreamness of industries and countries in GVCs. Second, we employ data from the World...