Search Results
Report
President’s Message: Trade and Globalization since the 1980s
St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard discusses the growth of international trade since the 1980s and the reassessment of globalization in recent years.
Working Paper
Offshoring, Mismatch, and Labor Market Outcomes
We study the role of labor market mismatch in the adjustment to a trade liberalization that results in the offshoring of high-tech production. Our model features two-sided heterogeneity in the labor market: high- and low-skilled workers are matched in a frictional labor market with high- and low-tech firms. Mismatch employment occurs when high-skilled workers choose to accept a less desirable job in the low-tech industry. The main result is that--perhaps counter-intuitively--this type of job displacement is actually beneficial for the labor market in the country doing the offshoring. Mismatch ...
Trade Linkages in the Shadow of the Russia-Ukraine War
Skeptics have raised questions about the future of globalization. Could divisions over the war provide insights into the strength of global trade ties?
Report
The Long-Term Rise of Labor Market Detachment: Evidence from Local Labor Markets
We develop a measure of chronic joblessness among prime-age men and women in the United States—termed the detachment rate— that identifies those who have been out of the labor force for more than a year. We show that the detachment rate more than doubled for men since the early 1980s and rose by a quarter for women since 2000, though it is consistently considerably higher for women than men. We then explore the economic geography of labor market detachment to help explain its rise. Results show that the detachment rate increased more in places with weak local economies, particularly those ...
Working Paper
Sixty Years of Global Inflation: A Post-GFC Update
Is inflation (still) a global phenomenon? We study the international co-movement of inflation based on a dynamic factor model and in a sample spanning up to 56 countries during the 1960-2023 period. Over the entire period, a first global factor explains approximately 58% of the variation in headline inflation across all countries and over 72% in OECD economies. The explanatory power of global inflation is equally high in a shorter sample spanning the time since 2000. Core inflation is also remarkably global, with 53% of its variation attributable to a first global factor. The explanatory ...
Working Paper
Container Trade and the U.S. Recovery
Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a structural macroeconomic VAR model facilitates the identification of shocks to domestic U.S. demand as well as foreign demand for U.S. manufactured goods. We show that, unlike in the Great Recession, the primary determinant of the U.S. economic contraction in early 2020 was a sharp drop in domestic demand. ...
Report
Annual Report 2022: The Shifting Tides of Global Trade
The St. Louis Fed’s 2022 annual report examines the trends in international trade and globalization with comments and insight from Bank leaders.
Journal Article
Interview: Pinelopi Goldberg
Pinelopi Goldberg: On developing countries, measuring economies by satellite, and the learning crisis.
Working Paper
The Rise of Exporting By U.S. Firms
Although a great deal of ink has been spilled over the consequences of globalization, we do not yet fully understand the causes of increased worldwide trade. Using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census, we document widespread entry into countries abroad by U.S. firms from 1987 to 2006. We show that this extensive margin growth is unlikely to have been due to significant declines in entry costs. We instead find evidence of large roles for the development of the internet, trade agreements, and foreign income growth in driving these trends.
Discussion Paper
What if China Manufactures a Sugar High?
While the slump in China’s property sector has been steep, Chinese policymakers have responded to the falloff in property activity with policies designed to spur activity in the manufacturing sector. The apparent hope is that a pivot toward production-intensive growth can help lift the Chinese economy out of its current doldrums, which include weak household demand, high levels of debt, and demographic and political headwinds to growth. In a series of posts, we consider the implications of two alternative Chinese policy scenarios for the risks to the U.S. outlook for real activity and ...