This volume considers the American manufacturing industry, and develops a statistical portait of the microeconomic adjustments that affect business and workers. The authors focus on the employer rather than worker side of the process aiming to show the processes that will be relevant to economists.

Table of Contents:
Concepts, measurements, and data: job creation and destruction; job reallocation and worker reallocation; the LRD: data and measurement. Basic facts about job creation and destruction: magnitude; persistence; concentration; cyclicality; the connection between job reallocation and worker reallocation. Similarities and differences by industry and other sectors: variation across industries: implications for worker flows, excess job reallocation and plant-level heterogeneity, which industries create the most jobs? variation across regions; variation by wage level: wages and net job growth, wages and gross job flows; variation by exposure to international trade; variation by productivity growth, factor intensity, and degree of specialization; quantifying the role of between-sector employment shifts; sector variation in the persistence of job creation and destruction. Differences by size and age of plants and firms: context and motivation; measuring employer size and employer age; job creation and destruction rates by employer size; the size distribution fallacy; netting out reality; the regression fallacy; an unsuitable database; what fraction of new manufacturing jobs did small employers create? job creation and destruction rates by plant age; the durability of jobs by employer size and age. Job flows and business cycles: context and motivation; the prevailing view of business cycles: the macroeconomic framework, some empirical underpinnings of the prevailing view, implications for layoffs, predictions for job creation and destruction dynamics; time-series evidence on creation and destruction: total manufacturing, variation among sectors and plant types, a summary of the LRD evidence, evidence based on other data sources; some theoretical elements of a richer view of recessions: the role of heterogeneity and reallocation frictions, allocative shocks as driving forces behind aggregate fluctuations, aggregate shocks and reallocation timing effects, information spillovers, allocative shocks, and aggregate fluctuations; a case study - restructuring in the steel industry; differences among recessions. Job flows, worker flows, and unemployment over the business cycle: context and motivation; the relationship between job flows and the unemployement rate; gross worker flows - concepts and magnitudes; the time-series relationship between worker and job flows: total unemployement flows, unemployment flows by reason, unemployment flows by age and sex, putting the pieces together, some missing pieces; appendix: seasonal variation in the flows. Economic and policy implications: the limitations of our statistical portrait; heterogeneity in job growth outcomes. (Part contents).