Even before the Great Recession, U.S. employment growth was unimpressive. Between 2000 and 2007, the economy gave back the considerable employment gains achieved during the 1990s, with a historic contraction in manufacturing employment being a prime contributor to the slump. We estimate that...

We evaluate the duration of the China trade shock and its impact on a wide range of outcomes over the period 2000 to 2019. The shock plateaued in 2010, enabling analysis of its effects for nearly a decade past its culmination. Adverse impacts of import competition on manufacturing employment,...

Do firms in China share rents with their workers? We address this question by examining firm-level panel data covering virtually all manufacturing firms over the period 2000-2007, representing an average of 200,000 firms and 54 million workers per year. We find robust evidence of rent sharing...

This paper uses detailed production data from a half million Chinese manufacturing plants over 1998-2007 to estimate the effects of temperature on firm-level total factor productivity (TFP), factor inputs, and output. We detect an inverted U- shaped relationship between temperature and TFP and...

Does higher import competition increase formalization and aggregate productivity? Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation from Chinese imports, we provide empirical causal evidence that higher imports increases the share of formal manufacturing enterprise employment in India. This formal share...

Previous research finds that the greater geographic mobility of foreign than native-born workers facilitates labor market adjustment to shifting regional economic conditions. We examine immigration's role in enabling U.S. commuting zones to respond to manufacturing job loss caused by import...

Covid-19 and the measures taken to contain it have led to unprecedented constraints on work and leisure activities, across the world. This paper uses nationally representative surveys to document how people of different ages and incomes have been affected across six countries (China, South...