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Working Paper
The Energy Boom and Manufacturing in the United States
This paper examines the response of U.S. manufacturers to changes in competitiveness brought about by movements in the price of natural gas. I estimate the response of various measures of manufacturing activity using panel regression methods across roughly 80 industries that allow each industry's response to vary with its energy intensity. These estimates suggest that the fall in the price of natural gas since 2006 is associated with a 2 to 3 percent increase in activity for the entire manufacturing sector, with much larger effects of 30 percent or more for the most energy intensive ...
Working Paper
Disentangling the Effects of the 2018-2019 Tariffs on a Globally Connected U.S. Manufacturing Sector
Since the beginning of 2018, the United States has undertaken unprecedented tariff increases, with one goal of these actions being to boost the manufacturing sector. In this paper, we estimate the effect of the tariffs---including retaliatory tariffs by U.S. trading partners---on manufacturing employment, output, and producer prices. A key feature of our analysis is accounting for the multiple ways that tariffs might affect the manufacturing sector, including providing protection for domestic industries, raising costs for imported inputs, and harming competitiveness in overseas markets due ...
Working Paper
Investment Responses to Trade Liberalization : Evidence from U.S. Industries and Establishments
This paper examines the effect of a change in U.S. trade policy on the domestic investment of U.S. manufacturers. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we find that industries more exposed to reductions in import tariff uncertainty exhibit relative declines in investment after the change in trade policy. Within industries, we find that this relationship is concentrated among establishments with low initial levels of labor productivity, capital intensity and skill intensity. For plants with high initial levels of skill intensity, we find that increased exposure is ...
Working Paper
The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment
This paper finds a link between the sharp drop in U.S. manufacturing employment beginning in 2001 and a change in U.S. trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries where the threat of tariff hikes declines the most experience more severe employment losses along with larger increases in the value of imports from China and the number of firms engaged in China-U.S. trade. These results are robust to other potential explanations of the employment loss, and we show that the U.S. employment trends differ from those in the E.U., where there was no change in ...
Working Paper
New Perspectives on the Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment
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 of employment over this period, while also highlighting the difficulties of estimating an overall contribution for each mechanism. Toward that end, we discuss how further analysis of these trends might yield sharper insights.
Blog
Labor Economy at Greater Risk in Texas than U.S. During COVID-19 Crisis
The coronavirus crisis could more adversely affect the Texas economy than the U.S. economy due to the state’s relatively large share of at-risk jobs, a review of data suggests.
Working Paper
Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey: survey methodology and performance
The Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey (TMOS) is a monthly survey of area manufacturers conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. TMOS indexes provide timely information on manufacturing activity in Texas, which is useful for understanding broader changes in regional economic conditions. This paper describes the survey methodology and analyzes the explanatory and predictive power of TMOS indexes with regard to other measures of state economic activity. Regression analysis shows that several TMOS indexes successfully explain monthly changes in Texas employment and quarterly changes in ...
Discussion Paper
A Crooked Road to a Creative Economy
The Crooked Road trail celebrates the cultural history of Appalachian music and arts. In 2015, it was estimated to bring $6.4 million in tourism spending to the region annually and continues to promote growth in southwest Virginia’s tourism industry today.
Journal Article
As Manufacturing Weakens, Consumers Pull Back
The United States has faced two recent downturns in manufacturing: one from 2014 to 2015 and one that has been ongoing since 2018. We examine consumption growth at the state level to see how consumers have responded to the current downturn relative to the last. We find that during the current downturn, changes in consumption growth at the state level have been negatively correlated with the state?s share of workers in manufacturing. In contrast, we find the opposite relationship during the 2014?15 downturn.
Journal Article
The Drag of Energy and Manufacturing on Productivity Growth
Willem Van Zandweghe finds a decline in manufacturing and mining activity has slowed overall productivity growth.