International Trade, Employment, and Earnings: Evidence from U.S. Rural Counties
May 2003
Working Paper Number:
CES-03-12
Abstract
Rural manufacturers in the United States are considered highly vulnerable to competition from international imports. Yet only limited empirical attention has been paid to the effects of trade on U.S. rural economies. This paper investigates the effects of international trade on U.S. rural manufacturing economies and compares the effects of trade pressures in rural versus urban areas. Our results indicate that lower export prices are associated with increased manufacturing employment and earnings in both rural and urban counties, while lower import prices are associated with reduced rural employment but increased urban employment. Greater export orientation is associated with lower employment and earnings in both rural and urban counties, while import orientation has mixed effects.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
production,
market,
industrial,
sale,
manufacturing,
import,
export,
produce,
midwest,
regional,
shipment,
tariff,
exporting,
rural,
agricultural,
agriculture,
globalization,
imported
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Longitudinal Research Database,
Center for Economic Studies,
North American Free Trade Agreement,
Department of Agriculture,
Research Data Center,
Regional Economic Information System
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'International Trade, Employment, and Earnings: Evidence from U.S. Rural Counties' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperRegional Income Inequality and International Trade🔥
July 2003
Working Paper Number:
CES-03-15
International trade is frequently cited as a cause of rising income inequality between individuals and across countries. Less attention has been paid to the effects of trade on inequality across regions within countries. Trade may enhance regional inequalities due to differences in regional trade involvement and in the prices of export and import-competing goods produced in different regions. This study investigates the effects of trade on income inequality across regions in the United States. Using both structural and price-based measures of regional trade involvement, we evaluate the effects of trade on inequality within and across states, the metro and nonmetro portions of the states, and the major Census regions. Across all states and across metro and nonmetro areas, we find that trade affects inequality primarily via import and export prices. In contrast to our expectations, however, a weaker dollar 'more expensive imports and cheaper exports ' is associated with a worsening of a state's position relative to other states, and greater inequality within a state. Across the Census regions, both our price and measures had significant effects, but the direction of these effects varied by region. Whereas most regions benefited from cheaper imports, states located in regions that are traditionally home to low-wage sectors, including the Southeast and South Central regions, were made relatively worse off by lower import prices and by greater orientation toward import-competing goods. Our findings reinforce notions about the uneven impacts of globalization and suggest that policy measures are needed to ensure that both the benefits and costs of international trade involvement are shared across regions.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperInternational Trade and the Changing Demand for Skilled Workers in High-Tech Manufacturing🔥
August 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-22
This paper examines the effects of changing trade pressures on the demand for skilled workers in high-tech and traditional manufacturing industry groupings and in individual high-tech sectors. For industry groupings, changing import and export prices have mixed effects, with coefficients switching signs between wage share and employment share models. These findings suggest that changes in earnings and employment of skilled workers are not moving in the same direction in response to shifting trade pressures. For individual high-tech sectors, both price and orientation measures had significant effects, but the direction of these effects varied substantially by sector.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperExport Performance and State Industrial Growth
January 1990
Working Paper Number:
CES-90-03
This research examines whether state industrial growth over the past decade has occurred independently of changes in manufacturing exports and whether export employment growth responds to the same economic and locational forces as employment growth in domestic production. The empirical results indicate that employment and value added growth are not independent of export sales growth; however, a shift toward export markets is not strongly associated with higher manufacturing growth rates. Traditional factors account for a far greater proportion of the variation in domestic than export employment growth. The results suggest the need for additional research on the sources of state comparative advantage in export markets.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperImpacts of Trade on Wage Inequality in Los Angeles: Analysis Using Matched Employer-Employee Data
April 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-12
Over the past twenty-five years, earnings inequality has risen dramatically in the US, reversing trends of the preceding half-century. Growing inequality is closely tied to globalization and trade through the arguments of Heckscher-Ohlin. However, with only few exceptions, empirical studies fail to show that trade is the primary determinant of shifts in relative wages. We argue that lack of empirical support for the trade-inequality connection results from the use of poor proxies for worker skill and the failure to control for other worker characteristics and plant characteristics that impact wages. We remedy these problems by developing a matched employer-employee database linking the Decennial Household Census (individual worker records) and the Longitudinal Research Database (individual manufacturing establishment records) for the Los Angeles CMSA in 1990 and 2000. Our results show that trade has a significant impact on wage inequality, pushing down the wages of the less-skilled while allowing more highly skilled workers to benefit from exports. That impact has increased through the 1990s, swamping the influence of skill-biased technical change in 2000. Further, the negative effect of trade on the wages of the less-skilled has moved up the skill distribution over time. This suggests that over the long-run, increasing levels of education may not insulate more skilled workers within developed economies from the impacts of trade.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Rural-Urban Gap In Manufacturing Productivity And Wages: Effects Of Industry Mix And Region
June 1997
Working Paper Number:
CES-97-06
This study analyzes urban and rural values of value added per worker and production worker wages tabulated from unpublished 1992 Census of Manufactures data. A decomposition of regional averages separates out effects of regional industry mix from within-industry differentials over a rural-urban continuum and for metro and nonmetro portions of census regions. Comparison of actual 1991-1993 employment growth with regional wage and productivity differentials shows that low wages are strongly associated with job growth.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTHE IMPACT OF LATINO-OWNED BUSINESS ON LOCAL ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-34
This paper takes advantage of the Michigan Census Research Data Center to merge limited-access Census Bureau data with county level information to investigate the impact of Latino-owned business (LOB) employment share on local economic performance measures, namely per capita income, employment, poverty, and population growth. Beginning with OLS and then moving to the Spatial Durbin Model, this paper shows the impact of LOB overall employment share is insignificant. When decomposed into various industries, however, LOB employment share does have a significant impact on economic performance measures. Significance varies by industry, but the results support a divide in the impact of LOB employment share in low and high-barrier industries.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTask Trade and the Wage Effects of Import Competition
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-03
Do job characteristics modulate the relationship between import competition and the wages of workers who perform those jobs? This paper tests the claim that workers in occupations featuring highly routine tasks will be more vulnerable to low-wage country import competition. Using data from the US Census Bureau, we construct a pooled cross-section (1990, 2000, and 2007) of more than 1.6 million individuals linked to the establishment in which they work. Occupational measures of vulnerability to trade competition ' routineness, analytic complexity, and interpersonal interaction on the job ' are constructed using O*NET data. The linked employer-employee data allow us to model the effect of low-wage import competition on the wages of workers with different occupational characteristics. Our results show that low-wage country import competition is associated with lower wages for US workers holding jobs that are highly routine and less complex. For workers holding nonroutine and highly complex jobs, increased import competition is associated with higher wages. Finally, workers in occupations with the highest and lowest levels of interpersonal interaction see higher wages, while workers with medium-low levels of interpersonal interaction suffer lower wages with increased low-wage import competition. These findings demonstrate the importance of accounting for occupational characteristics to more fully understand the relationship between trade and wages, and suggest ways in which task trade vulnerable occupations can disadvantage workers even when their jobs remain onshore.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperA Warm Embrace or the Cold Shoulder: Wage and Employment Outcomes in Ethnic Enclaves
April 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-09
This paper examines how immigrant enclaves influence labor market outcomes. We examine the effect of ethnic concentration on both immigrant earnings and employment in high immigration states using the non-public use, 1-in-6 sample of the 2000 U.S. Census. Although we find that there is some variability in the estimated enclave effects, they exhibit an overall negative impact. Male and female immigrants from several ethnic groups tend to earn lower wages when residing in areas with larger ethnic concentrations. Similarly, for employment, most of the statistically significant effects are negative, although much smaller than the enclave impacts on earnings.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTrends in Regional Industrial Concentration in the United States
April 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-06
In a seminal article, Benjamin Chinitz (1961) raises the question of the effects that industry size, structure, and economic diversification may have on firm performance and regional economies. His line of inquiry suggests a related but conceptually distinct issue: how does the extent to which a industry is regionally dominated'concentrated locally in a single or small number of firms'impact the local performance of that industry? This question has received little attention, principally because accurately measuring industrial concentration at the regional scale requires firm-level information. This paper makes use of confidential plant- and firm-level manufacturing data to explore patterns of industrial concentration in the United States at the regional scale. Regional analogues of concentration ratios and other measures commonly used in the aspatial industrial organization literature indicate the extent to which manufacturing activity is concentrated in a small number of firms. Both the manufacturing sector as a whole and major manufacturing industry sectors are examined in order to determine the extent of industrial concentration in the continental United States, to explore changes over time in geographic patterns of concentration, and to investigate associations between industrial concentration and employment growth at the regional scale. Implications for understanding regional growth and for devising regional economic development policy are discussed.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEXPORTERS, SKILL UPGRADING AND THE WAGE GAP*
November 1994
Working Paper Number:
CES-94-13
This paper examines plant level evidence on the increase in demand for non-production workers in U.S. manufacturing during the 1980's. The major finding is that increases in employment at exporting plants contribute heavily to the observed increase in relative demand for skilled labor in manufacturing during the period. Exporters account for almost all of the increase in the wage gap between high and low-skilled workers. Tests of the competing theories with plant level data show that demand changes associated with increased exports are strongly associated with the wage gap increases. Increases in plant technology are determinants of within plant skill-upgrading but not of the aggregate wage gap rise.View Full Paper PDF
