Cheap imports and the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs

Abigail Cooke, Tom Kemeny and David Rigby

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/57869/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:57869

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