We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on local U.S. labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization while instrumenting for imports using changes in Chinese imports by...

Even before the Great Recession, U.S. employment growth was unimpressive. Between 2000 and 2007, the economy gave back the considerable gains in employment rates it had achieved during the 1990s, with major contractions in manufacturing employment being a prime contributor to the slump. The U.S....

We present a methodology for estimating the distributional effects of an endogenous treatment that varies at the group level when there are group-level unobservables, a quantile extension of Hausman and Taylor (1981). Because of the presence of group-level unobservables, standard quantile...

This paper examines the role of international trade for job polarization– the decline in opportunities for mid-wage workers while those for high- and low-wage workers increase. With employer-employee matched data on virtually all workers and firms in Denmark between 1999 and 2009, we show that...

In a stylized model, firms differentiate their products to escape import com- petition. Facing a nested CES demand, each firm chooses between a nest with competitors and its own nest under higher costs. The profit from differentiation is an inverted U-shaped function of firm productivity. It...

Has rising import competition contributed to the polarization of U.S. politics? Analyzing outcomes from the 2002 and 2010 congressional elections and the 2000, 2008, and 2016 presidential elections, we detect an ideological realignment that is centered in trade-exposed local labor markets and...

This paper considers the effects of Chinese import competition on firm-level labor market outcomes in Portugal. We examine direct competition in the Portuguese market and indirect competition Portugal's largest export markets in Western Europe. Using rich employer-employee data matched to...

In the two decades straddling China's WTO accession, the China Shock, i.e. the rapid trade integration of China in the early 2000's, has had a profound economic impact across U.S. regions. It is now both an internationally litigated issue and the casus belli for a global trade war. Were its...