Industrial Mobilization for Crisis Response The Role of Adaptive Situational Awareness, Short Term Economic Dynamism, and Regional Ecosystems

 This dissertation consists of three papers, all broadly around the theme of national and  regional resilience to shocks, and heterogeneity in regional capabilities across the United States  of America.  

Paper 1 addresses how U.S. policymakers can spin up data collection abilities to monitor  a domestic manufacturing base during a rapidly evolving crisis. The abstract reads: U.S federal  and state governments lacked a sufficiently complete, accurate and evolving picture of the  present state of critical manufacturing of medical supplies to respond effectively to COVID-19  and other pandemic emergencies. Government sources of firm data are useful to measure  economic activity and composition in a steady state but are not designed to capture rapid changes  during emergencies. Existing government surveys provide precise and accurate snapshots of U.S.  capabilities, but do not capture the rapidly evolving supply status during a crisis such as the  COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, government officials can make direct requests for information  from companies, they are poorly equipped to do frequent and comprehensive large-scale data  collection. To assess the consequences of this data gap, we used weekly web scraping from (May  30, 2020, to September 7, 2021) of Thomasnet -- a leading North American Manufacturing  industrial sourcing platform -- to develop a real-time and evolving list of firms that during the  pandemic’s most severe shortages self-identified as manufacturing domestically masks,  respirators, or their intermediate inputs. We then validate domestic location status and  manufacturing capabilities via firm websites, information from industry associations, data from  DB Hoovers, and interviews directly with companies. We conclude with new theory on how a  product’s entry costs, capital intensity of production, time to production and market,  technological complexity, and critically to national objectives may influence whether data on  v domestic production capacity of specific products should be collected not all, continuously  (semiconductors), or spun up during shortages (masks). 

Paper 2 addresses the question of where are there opportunities for small and medium  sized firms to contribute to an industrial mobilization response? The abstract reads: This paper  investigates the role of short-term economic dynamism in responding to crisis induced supply  shortages. We focus on the domestic manufacturing ramp-up of surgical masks, respirators, and  their intermediary products in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We develop a novel method  for timely identification and validation of the evolving state of domestic manufacturing. To  unpack the activities of domestic manufacturers and related institutions, we triangulate across 56  qualitative interviews, certifications, Thomasnet.com®, industry associations, and other public  data. We find that while large manufacturers could rapidly scale up, onshore, or diversify  production to enter into domestic production of critical medical supplies, these large  manufacturers alone were insufficient to meet the spike in demand. In face of this shortage, small  and medium enterprises (SME), who entered into mask and respirator production as de novo  firms, spin-offs, and by diversifying, were important in increasing overall domestic capacity and  serving markets unmet by large hospital distributors. We propose new theory for how and when  federal and state governments should support short-term economic dynamism (firm entry into  target products and/or markets) during crises to address supply shortages, and the types of  market and network failures federal or state governments may be most effective at addressing.  

Paper 3 highlights regional and industrial variation in manufacturing activity. The  abstract reads: We introduce a novel and nuanced measure of agglomeration with two  components that differentiate between horizontal (co-location with the own/peer industries) and  vertical (co-location with suppliers) agglomeration. Using employment and establishment data at the US county level and the six-digit industry level, we demonstrate that industries and regions  vary in their degree of vertical versus horizontal agglomeration, and only certain regions appear  to support high levels of both types of agglomeration. Moreover, we find that industry-level  differences in horizontal versus vertical agglomeration are correlated with industry  characteristics. Industries that rely more heavily on physical inputs are correlated with vertical  (supplier) agglomeration while more R&D intensive industries are correlated with horizontal  (peer) agglomeration. These differences are overlooked with existing agglomeration measures.  This research offers important implications for regional and industrial policy interventions.