Research

The evolution of work is of emerging importance to advanced economies' growth. In this study, we develop a new semantic-distance-based algorithm to identify ``new work," namely the new types of jobs introduced in the US. We characterize how ``new work" relates to task content and skill characteristics of workers and document its geographic distribution and association with employment growth. Then, we analyze whether local factors associated in the previous literature with agglomeration economies and productivity growth  as well as local exposures to global shocks---technology, trade, immigration, and population aging---predict the creation of ``new work."  We find local supply of college educated in 1980 as the strongest predictor of ``new work." Using the historical location of 4-year colleges, a strong instrument for local college share, we find a positive and significant causal effect of local supply of human capital on ``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.