This paper examines the challenges that the manufacturing sector has faced over the last half century - focusing on both long- and short-term performance. It first examines whether there is evidence that this sector is in long-term decline. The paper also investigates how the industry has...

We process information in a large number of wage contracts, signed over a period of several decades, to generate the long-run history of the real wage for each bargaining pair. We term these hitherto unexamined histories 'chronologies'. We are able to generate 1574 continuous real wage...