Understanding the formation of individual trade policy preferences is a fundamental input into the modeling of trade policy outcomes. Surprisingly, past studies have found mixed evidence that various labor market and industry attributes of workers affect their trade policy preferences, even...

By exploiting establishment-level data, this paper sheds new light on the source of the changes in the structure of production, wages, and employment that have occurred over the last several decades. Based on theoretical work by Caselli (1999) and Kremer and Maskin (1996), we focus on...

Several analysts claim that firms have been using more flexible work arrangements in order to contain the costly adjustment of labor to changes in economic conditions. In particular, temporary help supply (THS) employment has increased dramatically in the last ten years. However, there is only...

This paper estimates returns to scale for manufacturing industries around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States by exploiting an industry-city panel data for the years 1880-1930. We estimate decreasing returns to scale on average over the period, contrary to most of the existing...

We model the implications of the classical ideas that larger markets allow for a finer division of labor and this division feeds back into larger market size. Market size affects specialization due to firm-level increasing returns to scale arising from fixed costs of adopting...

We assess whether and why trade competition partly explains the sharp decline in U.S. workers' attempts to organize labor unions in recent decades. We find that between 1990-2007, import competition due to the "China Shock" lowered union certification elections by 4.5% among workers in...

This paper provides an overview of recent trends in the U.S. basic industries. It first documents the dramatic fall in their shares of domestic employment and global production. It then considers explanations for these industries' relative -- and, in some instances, absolute -- decline. Those...