The rapid growth of offshoring has sparked a contentious debate over its impact on the U.S. manufacturing sector, which has recorded steep employment declines yet strong output growth—a fact reconciled by the notable gains in manufacturing productivity. We maintain, however, that the dramatic...

Many industries are geographically concentrated. Many mechanisms that could account for such agglomeration have been proposed. We note that these theories make different predictions about which pairs of industries should be coagglomerated. We discuss the measurement of coagglomeration and use...

This paper explores the impact of globalization on some determinants of per worker labor productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and trade liberalization are examined as two main drivers of globalization in this study. The estimation...

This paper deals with the analysis of price-setting in U.S. manufacturing industries. Recent studies have heavily criticized the ability of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) to fit aggregate inflation [see, e.g., Rudd and Whelan, 2006, Can Rational Expectations Sticky-Price Models Explain...

Mergers lead to larger firms and a less competitive market structure, but their effects on innovation are not clear. Mergers may improve innovation incentives by promoting economies of scope and scale, R\&D activities, and increasing the ability to deal with uncertainties. However, mergers may...

This paper explores the impact of globalization on the micro-determinants of agglomeration, namely labor pooling (LP), goods pooling (GP), and idea pooling (IP). According to our estimates, LP now has a negative effect on employment agglomeration in U.S. manufacturing. More specifically, we find...

We examine the extent to which declining manufacturing employment may havecontributed to increasing inequality in advanced economies. This contribution is typicallysmall, except in the United States. We explore two possible explanations: the high initialmanufacturing wage premium and the high...

The notable rebound of U.S. manufacturing activity following the Great Recession has raised the question of whether the sector might be experiencing a renaissance. Using panel regressions, we find that a depreciating real exchange rate, an increasing spread in natural gas prices between the...

This chapter presents the major results of a comparative study of productivity growth in manufacturing in Japan and the United States conducted by the authors at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Japan was chosen for the comparison because the growth of productivity there has been extraordinary...