This paper develops a simple dynamic model to examine the breakout from a Malthusian economy to a modern growth regime. It identifies several factors that determine the fastest rate at which the population can grow without engendering declining living standards; this is termed maximum...

Despite its importance, the microeconomics of the international transmission of shocks is not well understood. The conventional wisdom is that relative price changes are the primary mechanism by which shocks are transmitted across borders. Yet traded-goods prices exhibit significant inertia in...

We examine the microeconomic and aggregate inventory dynamics in the business sector of the U.S. economy. We employ high-frequency firm-level data and use an empirically tractable model, in which the aggregate dynamics are derived explicitly from the underlying microeconomic data. Our results...

Using two decades of annual data, we explore the links between real exchange rates and employment, wages and overtime activity in specific U.S. manufacturing industries. Across two-digit industry levels of aggregation, exchange rate movements do not have large effects on numbers of jobs or on...

Does national market size matter for industrial structure? This has been suggested by theoretical work on "home market" effects, as in Krugman (1980, 1995). In this paper, I show that what previously was regarded as an assumption of convenience — transport costs only for the differentiated...

We examine inventory adjustment in the U.S. manufacturing sector using quarterly firm-level data over the period 1978-97. Our evidence indicates that the inventory investment process is nonlinear and asymmetric, results consistent with a nonconvex adjustment cost structure. The inventory...

We document the consequences of real exchange rate movements for the employment, hours, and hourly earnings of workers in manufacturing industries across individual states. Exchange rates have statistically significant wage and employment implications in these local labor markets. The importance...

A growing share of international trade occurs through intra-firm transactions-those between domestic and foreign subsidiaries of a multinational firm. The difficulties associated with writing and enforcing a vertical contract compound when a product must cross a national border, and may explain...

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of international spillovers related to productivity gains, changes in market size, or government spending. We introduce trade costs and endogenous varieties in a two-country general-equilibrium model with monopolistic competition, drawing a...

This paper revisits the hypothesis that changes in inventory management were an important contributor to volatility reductions during the Great Moderation. It documents how changes in inventory behavior contributed to the stabilization of the U.S. economy within the durable goods sector, in...