The Costs and Benefits of Buying American
Matilde Bombardini, Professor
Business, Haas School
Check back for status
he Buy American Act places strict limitations on the purchase of foreign manufacturing products by the U.S. Federal Government. Despite the increasingly U.S.-centered nature of many government programs, like the recent Inflation Reduction Act, we lack a detailed understanding of the costs and benefits of this type of policy. In this paper we document the sectoral and geographic concentration of purchases by the US government and we perform two exercises. In the first exercise we show that the presence of government purchases was not sufficient to shield commuting zones that were hit by the China Shock. In the second exercise we use a quantitative trade model to measure the costs to taxpayers of the restrictions imposed by Buy American.
Role: We need help with data merging and finding the geographical location of public procurement offices in the U.S. over time. We will, during the year, also need help with other data handling, creating tables and graphs.
Qualifications: We require strong familiarity with Python and/or Stata and string matching techniques. Previous experience with data cleaning, data visualization and regression analysis will give the candidate an advantage.
Hours: 6-8 hrs