New Perspectives on the Decline of US Manufacturing Employment

Abstract

We use relatively unexplored dimensions of US microdata to examine how US manufacturing employment has evolved across industries, firms, establishments and regions. 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 more careful analysis of these trends might yield sharper insights.