Cheap Imports and the Loss of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs

Abigail Cooke, Tom Kemeny and David Rigby

SERC Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: This paper examines the role of international trade, and specifically imports from low-wage countries, in determining patterns of job loss in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2007. Motivated by intuitions from factor-proportions-inspired work on offshoring and heterogeneous firms in trade, we build industry-level measures of import competition. Combining worker data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics dataset, detailed establishment information from the Census of Manufactures, and transaction-level trade data, we find that rising import competition from China and other developing economies increases the likelihood of job loss among manufacturing workers with less than a high school degree; it is not significantly related to job losses for workers with at least a college degree.

Keywords: International trade; import competition; job loss; inequality; manufacturing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F15 F16 F6 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/sercdp0148.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Cheap Imports and the Loss of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs (2016)
Journal Article: Cheap Imports and the Loss of US Manufacturing Jobs (2015)
Working Paper: Cheap imports and the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:sercdp:0148

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