Essays On International Trade And Labor Market Outcomes

Abstract

The debate over the effects of globalization remains lively. The first chapter of the dissertation makes the point that the use of datasets that contain data on individual workers holds the promise of advancing this debate. Following this insight, in the second chapter I combine workers' data from the March Current Population Survey with trade data and study the effects of offshoring on the skill-premium. I show that industry-level wage regressions overestimate the impact of offshoring on the skill-premium if the demographic characteristics of the labor force are omitted. However, I also find that offshoring increases the relative employment of skilled workers, thus suggesting that offshoring has played an important role in the increase in the skill-premium by increasing the economy-wide relative demand of skilled workers. In the third chapter, I study whether offshoring in manufacturing is correlated with occupational switching. I find that offshoring does not increase the probability of switching occupations. Taken together, my results imply that, at least for the United States in the 1980s, offshoring increased wage inequality by increasing the skill-premium but did not affect residual wage inequality.