Andrei Levchenko Publications

This article provides a general framework to study the role of production networks in international GDP comovement. We first derive an additive decomposition of bilateral GDP comovement into components capturing shock transmission and shock correlation. We quantify this decomposition in a parsimonious multi-country, multi-sector dynamic network propagation model, using data for the G7 countries over the period 1978–2007. Our main finding is that while the network transmission of shocks is quantitatively important, it accounts for a minority of observed comovement under the estimated range of structural elasticities. Contemporaneous responses to correlated shocks in the production network are more successful at generating comovement than intertemporal propagation through capital accumulation. Extensions with multiple shocks, nominal rigidities, and international financial integration leave our main result unchanged. A combination of TFP and labour supply shocks is quantitatively successful at reproducing the observed international business cycle.

To counteract the adverse effects of shocks, such as the global pandemic, on the economy, governments have discussed policies to improve the resilience of supply chains by reducing dependence on foreign suppliers. In this paper, we develop and quantify an adaptive production network model to study network resilience and the consequences of reshoring of supply chains. In our model, firms exit due to exogenous shocks or the propagation of shocks through the network, while firms can replace suppliers they have lost due to exit subject to switching costs and search frictions. Applying our model to a large international firm-level production network dataset, we find that restricting buyer–supplier links via reshoring policies reduces output and increases volatility and that volatility can be amplified through network adaptivity.