The United States remains an attractive destination for foreign direct investment (FDI) for a variety of reasons, including a large consumer base, a productive workforce, a highly innovative environment and legal protections. As a result, foreign firms make investments in the United States on a regular basis by establishing new operations, purchasing existing operations of another company or...

Increasingly, consumers and independent service providers are engaging in transactions facilitated by an internet-based platform. The digital firms that provide the platforms are often collectively referred to as belonging to the "sharing" or "collaborative" economies, among other descriptors. However, in this paper, we narrow the focus and propose a definition of "digital matching firms" that...

Ninth in a Series of Manufacturing Profiles: What is Made in America? These profiles are a follow-up to the ESA report " What is Made in America ?" which estimates the dollar value and domestic-production percentage of what America produces. Made In America: Primary Metal Products In 2013, shipments from the U.S. manufacturing sector totaled $5.8 trillion. How much of these shipments do we make in...

Historically, manufacturing jobs have offered relatively high pay. However, there is not a consensus on the size of the pay premium for manufacturing jobs relative to the economy as a whole or even whether a premium continues to exist. This report turns to evidence to answer those questions, using ten federal datasets – each of which allows us to calculate and compare the average pay of...

There is a wealth of evidence that manufacturing jobs are good jobs. But not all manufacturing jobs are created equal. Published data highlight the considerable variation in pay and productivity across manufacturing industries. For example, workers in the computer and electronic product manufacturing industry earn an average of $34 per hour (as of May 2015), while those in apparel manufacturing...

The number of jobs in the temporary help services industry reached an all-time high of 2.9 million in May 2015, accounting for 2.4 percent of all private sector jobs in the U.S. economy. This short report looks at the latest official U.S. government statistics on the temporary help services industry and its workforce to provide an overview of its role in the labor market and the U.S. economy. The...

The American Community Survey (ACS) is the largest continuous household survey in the United States, providing a wealth of information about the economic, social and demographic characteristics of persons, as well as housing characteristics. One goal of the ACS is to serve as a cost-effective vehicle for collecting information required by law, regulation, or executive order on behalf of Federal...

The temporary help services industry has bounced back from the recession and continues to grow. Newly available data are enabling the Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) to re-examine this important industry and update a report on the temp industry that we published last year. 1 Although we don't know exactly how many temporary workers actually work in the manufacturing sector, we...