Research

An essential part of innovation and employment growth for advanced economies is the evolution of work---tasks and functions that culminate into distinctly new types of jobs, namely ``new work." Using text analysis, we develop an algorithm that identifies new job titles in the US economy based on their ``context-based'' distance from the closest existing job title in the previous period. We use this method to generate a measure of ``new work” from 1980 to 2010 in each of 354 occupations and construct its distribution across 722 commuting zones. We first show how ``new work" is associated with task and skill characteristics of workers in the occupations and to skill bias, innovation and employment growth in the commuting zones. Then, we analyze whether local population density, human capital, and manufacturing intensity in the 1980s, and/or local exposures to structural ``shocks" in the 1980-2010---relating to trade competition, technological change, immigration, and aging of population---predict the creation of ``new work." We find that the share of college-educated and the population density in 1980 are the strongest predictors of ``new work'' in the 1980-2010 period. The aging of the population and exposure to computer adoption are also associated with ``new work,'' while robot adoption was negatively associated with it. The exposure to immigration and trade had a smaller and differentiated correlation to "new work."

This paper studies long-run differences in intergenerational occupational mobility between Black and White Americans. Combining data from linked historical censuses and contemporary large-scale surveys, we provide a comprehensive set of mobility measures based on Markov chains that trace out the short- and long-run dynamics of occupational differences. Our findings highlight the unique importance of changes in mobility experienced by the 1940-1950 birth cohorts in shaping the current occupational distribution and reducing the racial gap. We further explore the properties of continuing occupational inequalities and argue that these disparities are better understood by a lack of exchange mobility rather than structural mobility and as such, extrapolating contemporary occupational dynamics cannot be expected to disappear on their own.

We study the role of offshoring in understanding long-run environmental impacts of tradeliberalization and the cleanup of US manufacturing. Leveraging detailed establishment-leveldata and a change in US trade policy toward China in the early 2000s, we show that USestablishments decrease toxic emissions in response to a reduction in trade policy uncertainty.Emission abatement is more pronounced for establishments that are more likely to engage inoffshoring activities. We provide comprehensive evidence that supports the pollution offshoringhypothesis: US manufacturers, especially those that emit pollutants intensely, source from abroad and establish more subsidiaries in China following the event.

This paper examines the importance of trade-induced restructuring at the extensive margin using measurements of new work. Leveraging a change in US trade policy toward China in 2001, I find that import exposure significantly increases the adoption of new work in manufacturing, facilitated by structural change through offshoring. The restructuring process induces compositional shifts toward non-production activities, such as marketing, logistics, and management, but not pre-production innovation-related tasks. Finally, I present evidence that these adjustments are skill-biased and that new-work adoption is a key mechanism through which trade shocks can increase labor market inequality.

This paper examines the labor market consequences of offshoring. We use the Danish employer-employee matched data together with the newly constructed skill measures to evaluate the effect of offshoring on wages and reallocation of workers within offshorable occupations. Offshoring reduces domestic worker wages; and increases the probability of reallocation away from the high-productivity firms to the low-productivity ones. The least-skilled workers further face a greater risk of switching out to a less competitive sector. On the firm side, offshoring improves the average skill of in-house workers at a lower cost. By estimating a worker-firm matching model, we examine the mechanisms of how offshoring affects labor market inequality and further assess the quantitative importance of various competing hypotheses such as technological change and the expansion of higher education, in addition to offshoring. We find substantially different effects: technology mainly increases the inequality between firms in terms of worker skill quality and average wages, while offshoring mitigates this rising trend.

My co-author and I are renovating this project into a related yet new one.