National Bureau of Economic Research

The structure of US international trade has undergone a dramatic transformation since 2018 when the US began imposing substantial tariffs targeting Chinese imports. This trade policy shift, combined with pandemic-era supply chain disruptions and subsequent geopolitical tensions, led US firms to reconsider their global sourcing strategies. 

In An Anatomy of the Great Reallocation in US Supply Chain Trade (NBER Working Paper 34490), Laura Alfaro and Davin Chor analyze detailed product-level trade data from the US Census Bureau, examining over 5,300 product categories over the period 2017 to 2025. They combine this trade data with information on tariff rates, product characteristics such as capital ...

Researchers in the Industrial Organization (IO) program study consumer and firm behavior, competition, innovation, and government regulation. This report begins with a brief summary of general developments in the last four decades in the range and focus of program members’ research, then discusses specific examples of recent work.

When the program was launched in the early 1990s, two developments had profoundly shaped IO research. One was the development of game-theoretic models of strategic behavior by firms with market power, summarized in Jean Tirole’s classic textbook. The initial wave of research in this vein was focused on applying new insights from economic theory; empirical applications came later. Then came the development of econometric methods to estimate demand and supply parameters in…

Death rates due to drug poisonings began to surge in the US in the mid-1990s, marking the emergence of an epidemic that has persisted for three decades. The health consequences have been stark, with annual deaths exceeding 100,000 since 2021.

In Prescription for Disaster: The SSDI Rate, Pain, and Prescribing Practices (NBER Working Paper 34265), William N. Evans and Ethan M. J. Lieber examine characteristics of counties in 1990—prior to the surge—that predict the county-level severity of opioid deaths after 2000. After considering a wide range of potential determinants, they focus on one factor: the percentage of the working-age population...

Younger entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in small business loan markets because lenders rely heavily on personal credit scores, which favor long histories of repaying debt. In Modernizing Access to Credit for Younger Entrepreneurs: From FICO to Cash Flow (NBER Working Paper 33367), researchers Christopher M. Hair, Sabrina T. Howell, Mark J. Johnson, and Siena Matsumoto document this fact and show that younger entrepreneurs benefit from underwriting that augments personal credit scores (like FICO) with cash flow data. They analyze comprehensive…