In the first two decades of this century, supply chains for many products became longer and more reliant on single-source low-cost providers of inputs or assemblers of final products. Just-in-time practices became more common, creating greater production vulnerabilities to interruptions in intermediate goods supplies and the potential for small shocks to be amplified. Logistical disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic along with rising geopolitical tensions have led many firms to re-assess their supply chains, with greater emphasis on resilience, multiple sources of supply, and “just in case” planning. Public policies have also promoted resilience by subsidizing domestic capacity investments in a number of strategically or economically significant sectors, and there is growing interest in identifying supply chain vulnerabilities.
To promote research on supply chain resilience at both the macroeconomic and the industry or product level, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with generous support from the Department of Homeland Security through the Cross-Border Threat Screening and Supply Chain Defense Center of Excellence at Texas A&M University, will host a one-day meeting on the measurement of and determinants of supply chain resilience. The meeting will be held in Cambridge, MA, on Friday December 13 2024. It will be organized by NBER affiliates Laura Alfaro (Harvard University), James Poterba (MIT), and Chad Syverson (University of Chicago).
The conference will address a range of issues related to supply chain resilience, with emphasis on identifying potential points of interruption and assessing response mechanisms that can reduce the impact of such failures. The conference will include a discussion of different approaches to measuring resilience, as well as some analysis of industry- or product-level supply chain risks.
Particular topics of interest for the conference include, but are not limited to:
- Identification of points of vulnerability in specific supply chains, such as sole-source providers or limited-throughput suppliers with no or little capacity to adapt in changing circumstances.
- Assessment of the consequences of supply chain disruption in strategically significant markets, for example those for critical minerals, transportation equipment, chemical feedstocks, and pharmaceutical products.
- Estimation of the impact of transportation costs, labor cost differentials, production technologies, climate change, tariff policies, and country risk profiles on the structure of global supply chains and their embedded vulnerabilities.
- Evaluation of alternative strategies for responding to supply chain interruptions, as well as strategies for avoiding them through re-shoring, “friend-shoring,” and multi-sourcing, and the measurement of how such strategies contribute to resilience.
- Analysis of special considerations in supply chain design that arise when products or industries have a key role in national security, including the estimation of shadow values to guide resilience-promoting investments.
- Measurement of the differences between short-run and long-run supply elasticities and analysis of their implications for supply chain resilience.
- Investigation of the role of cross-border supply chains for services, and how they resemble and differ from supply chains for goods, and how to measure resilience in the service sector.
The organizers welcome submissions of both empirical and theoretical research, papers on specific industries, and research by scholars who are early in their careers, who are not NBER affiliates, and who are from groups that are under-represented in the economics profession. To be considered for inclusion on the program, upload papers no later than 11:59pm EDT on Tuesday, September 24, 2024.
Please do not submit papers that have been accepted for publication and that will be published by December, 2024. Authors chosen to present papers will be notified by early October. The NBER will cover the travel costs for two co-authors per paper; all co-authors will be invited to attend the conference. Questions about this conference may be addressed to confer@nber.org.