Issue:
Over the last two decades, supply chains for many products have become longer and more reliant on single-source low-cost providers of inputs or assemblers of final products. Just-in-time practices became more common, creating greater vulnerability to shocks. While in many cases the evolving nature of supply chains reduced unit costs, it also created the potential for shocks at any point along the chain to be amplified.
Objectives:
- CBTS will partner with NBER to solicit research papers for a conference that will be held in January 2024. The conference will emphasize a review of existing economic research on supply chains, as well as current research papers on related topics.
- This project will involve seven distinct research studies. Some papers may focus on a particular industry, while others may examine data from multiple industries to identify broader trends and variations in how vulnerabilities emerge in different market and institutional environments.
- The research will consider how firms respond to the risk of disruption by investing in resilience and creating market institutions of various types, and more generally on how resilience can be built into supply chains and at what cost.
Value Proposition:
While the shift to globalized and highly coordinated production has been well documented, less is known about why firms have moved in this direction, the location of potential choke points in current supply chains, and the impact of public policies such as tariffs and domestic content restrictions on these chains. The proposed conference will feature research presentations on several of these issues, with the precise mix determined by the availability of high-quality research studies and the schedule of potential presenters.
| Project Lead | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| Research Team | PI: James Poterba MIT and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Co-PI: Laura Alfaro Harvard Business School and NBER Co-PI: Chad Syverson University of Chicago Booth School of Business and NBER |
| Budget | $61,583 |
| Duration | May 2023 – May 2024 |