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Import Competition and Skill Content in U.S. Manufacturing Industries

Yi Lu¹; Travis Ng²

¹ National University of Singapore · ² Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract Skill content varies enormously across industries and over time. This paper shows that import competition can explain a significant portion of the variation in various skill measures across manufacturing industries. Industries that face more intense import competition employ more nonroutine skill sets, including cognitive, interpersonal, and manual skills, and fewer cognitive routine skills. In addition, we find that the impact of import competition on skills is not driven by imports from low-wage countries or from China. A number of robustness checks also suggest that our results are unlikely to be driven by econometric problems.

DOI

10.1162/rest_a_00311

Volume

95 (4)

Pages

1404-1417

Language

en

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BibTeX

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