Gene M. Grossman

The Elusive Explanation for the Declining Labor Share

Annual Review of Economics · 2022 · 125 citations

A vast literature seeks to measure and explain the apparent decline in the labor share in national income that has occurred in recent times in the United States and elsewhere. The culprits include technological change, increased globalization and the rise of China, the enhanced exercise of market power by large firms in concentrated product markets, the decline in unionization rates and the erosion in the bargaining power of workers in labor markets, and the changing composition of the workforce…

When Tariffs Disrupt Global Supply Chains

American Economic Review · 2024-03-28 · 123 citations

We study unanticipated tariffs in a setting with firm-to-firm supply relationships. Firms conduct costly searches and negotiate with potential suppliers that pass a reservation level of match productivity. Global supply chains form in anticipation of free trade. Then, the home government surprises with an input tariff. This can lead to renegotiation with initial suppliers or search for replacements. Calibrating the model’s parameters to match initial import shares and the estimated responses to…

Supply Chain Resilience: Should Policy Promote International Diversification or Reshoring?

Journal of Political Economy · 2023-03-29 · 106 citations

Little is known about optimal policy in the face of global supply chain disruptions. Should governments promote resilience by subsidizing backup sources of input supply in multiple countries? Should they encourage firms to source from safer domestic suppliers? We address these questions in a model of production with a critical input and exogenous risks of supply disturbances. With constant elasticity of substitution preferences, a subsidy for diversification achieves the constrained social optim…

Identity Politics and Trade Policy

The Review of Economic Studies · 2020 · 104 citations

Abstract We characterize trade policies that result from political competition when assessments of well-being include both material and psychosocial components. The material component reflects, as usual, satisfaction from consumption. Borrowing from social identity theory, we take the psychosocial component as combining the pride and self-esteem an individual draws from the status of groups with which she identifies and a dissonance cost she bears from identifying with those that are different f…

The “New” Economics of Trade Agreements: From Trade Liberalization to Regulatory Convergence?

Econometrica · 2021-01-01 · 58 citations

What incentives do governments have to negotiate trade agreements that constrain their domestic regulatory policies? We study a model in which firms design products to appeal to local consumer tastes, but their fixed costs increase with the difference between versions of their product destined for different markets. In this setting, firms' profit‐maximizing choices of product attributes are globally optimal in the absence of consumption externalities, but national governments have unilateral inc…