In this paper, we study how occupation (or industry) tradability shapes local labor‐market adjustment to immigration. Theoretically, we derive a simple condition under which the arrival of foreign‐born labor into a region crowds native‐born workers out of (or into) immigrant‐intensive jobs, thus lowering (or raising) relative wages in these occupations, and we explain why this process differs within tradable versus within nontradable activities. Using data for U.S. commuting zones over the period 1980–2012, we find—consistent with our theory—that a local influx of immigrants crowds out employment of native‐born workers in more relative to less immigrant‐intensive nontradable jobs, but has no such effect across tradable occupations. Further analysis of occupation labor payments is consistent with adjustment to immigration within tradables occurring more through changes in output (versus changes in prices) when compared to adjustment within nontradables, thereby confirming our model's theoretical mechanism. We then use the model to explore the quantitative consequences of counterfactual changes in U.S. immigration on real wages at the occupation and region level.

In this paper, we examine net emigration from Mexico over the period 1960 to 2000. The data are consistent with labor supply shocks having made a substantial contribution to Mexican emigration, accounting for two-fifths of Mexican labor flows to the United States over the last two decades of the twentieth century. Net emigration rates by Mexican state birth year cohort display a strong positive correlation with the initial size of the Mexican cohort relative to the corresponding U.S. cohort. In states with long histories of emigration, the effects of cohort size on emigration are relatively strong, consistent with the existence of preexisting networks.

In recent decades, growth of world trade has been driven largely by rapid growth of trade in intermediate inputs. Much of input trade involves multinational firms locating input processing in their foreign affiliates, thereby creating global vertical production networks. We use firm-level data on U.S. multinationals to examine trade in intermediate inputs for further processing between parent firms and their foreign affiliates. Among our main findings are that demand for imported inputs is higher when affiliates face lower trade costs, lower wages for less-skilled labor, and lower corporate income tax rates.

In this paper, we develop a simple model of international outsourcing and apply it to processing trade in China.We observe China's processing exports broken down by who owns the plant and by who controls the inputs the plant processes.Multinational firms engaged in export processing in China tend to split factory ownership and input control with managers in China: the most common outcome is to have foreign factory ownership but Chinese control over input purchases.To account for this organizational arrangement, we appeal to a property-rights model of the firm.Multinational firms and the Chinese factory managers with whom they contract divide the surplus associated with export processing by Nash bargaining.Investments in input search, production, and marketing are partially relationship specific.In our benchmarks estimates, this relationship specificity is lowest in southern coastal provinces, where export markets are thickest, and highest in interior and northern provinces.The probability contracts are enforced has a similar pattern and is the lowest along the southern coast and the highest in the north.

border is not a new phenomenon, with previous surges occurring in the 1920s and 1950s, persis tent mass migration did not take hold until late in the twentieth century. Among the factors contributing to emigration from Mexico are weak growth in the country's labor demand and strong growth in its labor sup ply. Mexico's economy stagnated in the 1980s and 1990s, such that per capita GDP in the early 2000s was unchanged from two decades before. During periods of wage decline in Mexico, emi gration from the country spiked. Perhaps less appreciated is that the 1980s were also a period of accelerated growth in Mexico's relative labor supply. With the US baby boom peaking in 1960, the number of US native born individuals coming of working age actually declined in the 1980s. Adding in the secular increase in US educational attain ment, the number of native born American workers with less than a high school education has dropped sharply. In Mexico, high levels of fertility in the 1960s and 1970s meant that two decades hence the country had large numbers of young adults entering the labor force. While educational attainment has also increased in

Illegal Immigration, Border Enforcement, and Relative Wages: Evidence from Apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico Border by Gordon H. Hanson and Antonio Spilimbergo. Published in volume 89, issue 5, pages 1337-1357 of American Economic Review, December 1999

Aggregation Bias in the Factor Content of Trade: Evidence from U.S. Manufacturing by Robert C. Feenstra and Gordon H. Hanson. Published in volume 90, issue 2, pages 155-160 of American Economic Review, May 2000

We analyze the effect of exposure to international trade on earnings and employment of U.S. workers from 1992 through 2007 by exploiting industry shocks to import competition stemming from China’s spectacular rise as a manufacturing exporter paired with longitudinal data on individual earnings by employer spanning close to two decades. Individuals who in 1991 worked in manufacturing industries that experienced high subsequent import growth garner lower cumulative earnings, face elevated risk of obtaining public disability benefits, and spend less time working for their initial employers, less time in their initial two-digit manufacturing industries, and more time working elsewhere in manufacturing and outside of manufacturing. Earnings losses are larger for individuals with low initial wages, low initial tenure, and low attachment to the labor force. Low-wage workers churn primarily among manufacturing sectors, where they are repeatedly exposed to subsequent trade shocks. High-wage workers are better able to move across employers with minimal earnings losses and are more likely to move out of manufacturing conditional on separation. These findings reveal that import shocks impose substantial labor adjustment costs that are highly unevenly distributed across workers according to their skill levels and conditions of employment in the pre-shock period.

Even before the Great Recession, US 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 import competition from China, which surged after 2000, was a major force behind both recent reductions in US manufacturing employment and—through input-output linkages and other general equilibrium channels—weak overall US job growth. Our central estimates suggest job losses from rising Chinese import competition over 1999–2011 in the range of 2.0–2.4 million.

This paper explores the geographic overlap of trade and technology shocks across local labor markets in the United States. Regional exposure to technological change, as measured by specialization in routine task-intensive production and clerical occupations, is largely uncorrelated with regional exposure to trade competition from China. While the impacts of technology are dispersed throughout the United States, the impacts of trade tend to be more geographically concentrated, owing in part to the spatial agglomeration of labor-intensive manufacturing. Our findings highlight the feasibility of separately identifying the impacts of recent changes in trade and technology on US regional economies.