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

Abigail Cooke, Tom Kemeny and David L. Rigby

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

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)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2016-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
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Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2016/CES-WP-16-05.pdf First version, 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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)
Working Paper: Cheap imports and the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:16-05

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