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Gordon Hanson: Tradability and Immigration

2018-11-28

Tradability and the Labor-Market Impact of Immigration: 

Theory and Evidence from the U.S.

 

Time:10:30am - 12:00pm,Oct.29th,2018

Venue:Room 359S, Overseas Exchange Center,Peking University

Speaker:Gordon Hanson (Professor, Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego)

 

Abstract:

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 explain why this process differs within tradable versus within nontradable activities. Using data for U.S. commuting zones over the period 1980 to 2012, we find that consistent with our theory 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 within 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, thus confirming our model’s theoretical mechanism. We then use an extended quantitative model to interpret the magnitudes of our reduced-form estimates and to aggregate up the consequences of counterfactual changes in U.S. immigration from the region-occupation level to the region-level.

 

Speaker:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr.Gordon Hanson holds the Pacific Economic Cooperation Chair in International Economic Relations at UC San Diego, and has faculty positions in the Department of Economics and GPS, where he also is director of the Center on Global Transformation. He is presently a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining UC San Diego in 2001, he served on the economics faculty of the University of Michigan and the University of Texas. Hanson specializes in the economics of international trade, international migration and foreign direct investment. He has published extensively in the top academic journals of the economics discipline, including American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, and Journal of International Economics. His current research addresses how trade with China has affected the U.S. labor market, the consequences of skilled immigration for the U.S. economy and the long-run determinants of comparative advantage. He is currently co-editor of Journal of Economic Perspectives, and on the editorial boards for American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Besides, he is also a past co-editor of Review of Economics and Statistics and Journal of Development Economics. He was in Global Macroeconomics Advisory Committee of Meketa Investment Group from 2012 to 2016. In 2012, he was awarded the Excellence in Refereeing Award by American Economic Review. Hanson received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992.