U.S. manufacturing experienced a precipitous and historically unprecedented decline in employment in the 2000s. Many economists and other analysts — pointing to decades of statistics showing that manufacturing real (inflation-adjusted) output growth has largely kept pace with private sector...

We use relatively unexplored dimensions of US microdata to examine how US manufacturing employment has evolved across industries, firms, establishments, and regions from 1977 to 2012. We show that these data provide support for both trade- and technology-based explanations of the overall decline...

We use relatively unexplored dimensions of US microdata to examine how US manufacturing employment has evolved across industries, firms, establishments, and regions. We show that these data provide support for both trade- and technology-based explanations of the overall decline of employment...