Essays on Firms, Production, and Trade

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between firms' production decisions and their external economic environment. Using micro sources of data spanning multiple countries and decades of time, I show how the behavior of individual firms link up aggregate outcomes across industries and regions. The first chapter provides theory and evidence on joint production within US multi-industry manufacturing firms and quantifies the new cross-industry linkages that arise. The second chapter examines the extent to which structural change in the US--the fall of manufacturing's share of employment from 27 to 9 percent between 1977 and 2016--was driven by firms reallocating their use of physical inputs towards services in production. The third chapter finds that trade disruption in the aftermath of the 1947 partition of British India led to an eventual re-orientation of industrial development across regions within India.