Peter John Lambert

This paper leverages generative AI to build a network structure over 5,000 product nodes, where directed edges represent input-output relationships in production. We layout a two-step ‘build-prune’ approach using an ensemble of prompt-tuned generative AI classifications. The ‘build’ step provides an initial distribution of edge-predictions, the ‘prune’ step then re-evaluates all edges. With our AI-generated Production Network (AIPNET) in toe, we document a host of shifts in the network position of products and countries during the 21st century. Finally, we study production network spillovers using the natural experiment presented by the 2017 blockade of Qatar. We find strong evidence of such spill-overs, suggestive of on-shoring of critical production. This descriptive and causal evidence demonstrates some of the many research possibilities opened up by our granular measurement of product linkages, including studies of on-shoring, industrial policy, and other recent shifts in global trade.

This paper studies the effects of bank failure on firm performance. We collect 36 million loan records to build a novel dataset on the credit relationships of 1.8 million US firms, predominantly composed of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We then implement a staggered treatment difference-in-differences estimation strategy with 179 bank failures from 1990 to 2023 to estimate the effect of bank failure on firm-level survival and employment growth. We find that firms that had a credit relationship to a bank that fails are 6.7 percentage points (44.3%) more likely to fail themselves within five years of the bank failure. Additionally, firms that survive bank failures show 25% lower employment growth compared to firms banking with non-failed banks. These impacts of bank failure on firm performance persist for more than 10 years, are present for bank failures both during and outside the US financial crisis period, and are strongest for smaller enterprises. Our estimated effects are further supported by two natural experiments. Surprisingly, we observe that some bank failures had positive effects on firm outcomes, revealing that bank failure can, in rare cases, actually be fortuitous for affected firms. Overall, our findings suggest that bank failures exert a substantially larger influence on the real economy than previously recognized, possibly requiring a re-evaluation of current regulatory approaches to managing such events.

The pandemic catalyzed an enduring shift to remote work. To measure and characterize this shift, we examine more than 250 million job vacancy postings across five English-speaking countries. Our measurements rely on a state-of-the-art language-processing framework that we fit, test, and refine using 30,000 human classifications. We achieve 99\% accuracy in flagging job postings that advertise hybrid or fully remote work, greatly outperforming dictionary methods and also outperforming other machine-learning methods. From 2019 to early 2023, the share of postings that say new employees can work remotely one or more days per week rose more than three-fold in the U.S and by a factor of five or more in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. These developments are highly non-uniform across and within cities, industries, occupations, and companies. Even when zooming in on employers in the same industry competing for talent in the same occupations, we find large differences in the share of job postings that explicitly offer remote work.

Using a novel proprietary survey of UK manufacturing sites, we study the impact on employment of arguably the two most important industrial automation technologies of the past fifty years: computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools and industrial robots. First, we document the growing prevalence of both technologies across a wide range of industries between 2005 and 2023. Second, we use a local-projection difference-in-difference design to show that plants that adopt these technologies for the first time increase their employment by 6% to 9% compared to non-adopting plants in the same industry. Third, we find that for both technologies, automation is associated with an increase in employment among industry-competitor sites, and a positive overall impact on industry-level employment.