Reproducible Studies
Worked examples using the Leontief I-O data — each with an embedded narrative, charts produced by downloadable Python code, and a one-click bundle so you can reproduce every figure on your own machine.
Which Industries Are the Economy's Hubs?
Rasmussen linkage indices measure every sector's pull on suppliers (backward linkage) and push into downstream users (forward linkage). Sectors above average on both are the economy's strategic hinges — its key sectors.
What a Multiplier Really Measures
An output multiplier answers: if final demand for one sector rises by one dollar, how much does total economy-wide output increase? Multipliers are just column sums of the Leontief inverse — but the variation across sectors and over time reveals deep structural facts about the American economy.
If One Sector Vanished: Hypothetical Extraction
The Hypothetical Extraction Method (HEM) ranks every sector by the gross output the economy would lose if that sector disappeared entirely — as buyer and as supplier simultaneously. The answer is not always who you expect.
The Long Decline of U.S. Manufacturing, 1997–2024
U.S. manufacturing's share of GDP fell from 16.5% in 1997 to 10.0% in 2024 — a 6.5 percentage-point drop, or 39% of its starting weight. Gross output share fell even more sharply, from 36.9% to 19.8%. This study traces the trajectory, marks the crisis inflection points, and connects the decline to the structural facts visible in the I-O tables.
How COVID Bent the Input-Output Structure
The pandemic reallocated spending across industries at a pace not seen in the post-war data. Structural-change metrics computed from successive BEA input-output tables reveal a 2019→2020 disruption roughly 1.8 times larger than a typical year — and a 2020→2021 partial reversal that is itself larger than most normal years.
Mapping Supply Chains with Network Analysis
Treating the 2024 input-output A-matrix as a directed weighted network reveals which industries are genuine hubs — sectors whose output feeds everywhere and whose centrality cannot be averaged away. Eigenvector centrality computed via power iteration identifies professional services, insurance, chemicals, real estate, and primary metals as the backbone of U.S. supply chains.
Technology vs Demand: Decomposing Output Change, 1997–2024
Structural decomposition analysis (SDA) splits the $39.7 trillion rise in U.S. gross output between 1997 and 2024 into a final-demand effect and a technology effect. Demand growth accounts for more than 100 percent of the total; technology change — captured by shifts in the Leontief inverse L — subtracted slightly from output, with large opposing movements across sectors.
Which Government Spending Creates the Most Output?
Using the 2024 Leontief inverse and the BEA final-demand matrix, we compute an output multiplier for each of the twelve government spending categories: normalize the category's sectoral spending vector to one dollar and sum the induced economy-wide output (L·f_unit). Defense equipment and nondefense equipment top the rankings at 2.19 and 2.59 respectively; consumption-heavy categories cluster near 1.55–1.74.
Cost-Push Prices and the Wage Share
The price dual of the Leontief model shows how wage costs propagate through supply chains to raise output prices. A +10% compensation shock raises prices by 5.1–5.4% across sectors, with labor-intensive service supply chains hit hardest. The economy-wide labor share of value added has fallen from 57% in 1997 to 53% in 2024.
A Marxian Profit Rate from the Input-Output Table
I-O tables allow classical economists' categories — labor values, variable capital, surplus value, and the aggregate profit rate — to be computed directly from BEA data. Using flow proxies (no fixed-capital stock is available), the aggregate profit-rate proxy r = S/(C+V) rose from 0.287 in 1997 to 0.341 in 2024, while the correlation between labor values and price proxies across sectors is moderate (r ≈ 0.48), consistent with the classical claim that prices gravitate around values but diverge due to equalized profit rates.