We study the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladeshi women. We compare the marriage, childbearing, school enrollment and employment decisions of women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from...

We introduce firm and worker heterogeneity into a model of innovation-driven endogenous growth. Individuals who differ in ability sort into either a research sector or a manufacturing sector that produces differentiated goods. Each research project generates a new variety of the differentiated...

This paper develops a model to study the aggregate effects of labor market frictions in an open economy through their impact on the growth and investment decisions of firms. The model features interactions between firms' dynamic fixed investments in exporting and search frictions with job-to-job...

We study the effects of an export shock on labor allocation across household businesses and employers in the formal enterprise sector in a low-income country, Vietnam. We find that workers reallocate from household businesses to employers in the formal enterprise sector, with greater...

We demonstrate that simply by using the ethnic makeup surrounding a firm's location, we can predict, on average, which trade links are valuable for firms. Using customs and port authority data on the international shipments of all U.S. publicly-traded firms, we show that firms are significantly...

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....

In the past two decades, China's manufacturing exports have grown spectacularly, U.S. imports from China have surged, but U.S. exports to China have increased only modestly. Using representative, longitudinal data on individual earnings by employer, we analyze the effect of exposure to import...

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...

We develop a dynamic labor search model where production and consumption take place in spatially distinct labor markets with varying exposure to domestic and international trade. The model recognizes the role of labor mobility frictions, goods mobility frictions, geographic factors, and...

A number of studies have tried to gauge the effect of international trade on the rising U.S. skill premium by examining whether product prices in unskill-intensive sectors have fallen relative to prices in skill-intensive sectors. However, these studies do not estimate what share of domestic...