We study the impact of child labor standards in Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) on a variety of child labor market outcomes, including employment, education, and household inequality. We develop a stylized general equilibrium model of child labor in an economy open to international trade and...

We ask how globalization affects a government's incentives to set labor standards for its workers. In a stylized equilibrium model of global value chains, we find two contrasting results. First, each country chooses stricter labor standards with globalization than it would under autarky, because...

In a stylized model of multinational firms choosing host locations for their global value chains, host-country governments choose the strength of collective-bargaining rights that allow their workers to receive a share of the resulting quasi-rents. Each government must trade off the direct...

This note seeks the socioeconomic roots of racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality, using county-level mortality, economic, and demographic data from 3,140 counties. For all minorities, the minority's population share is strongly correlated with total COVID-19 deaths. For Hispanic/Latino and...

Numerous government policies have attempted to keep workers out of the workplace, on the assumption that this will lower transmission of COVID-19. We test that assumption, measuring the effect of aggregate workplace absence on US COVID deaths at the county level through August. Instrumenting...

A central institution of US trade policy is Fast-Track Authority (FT), by which Congress commits not to amend a trade agreement that is presented to it for ratification, but to subject the agreement to an up-or-down vote

We study the effects of local partisanship in a model of electoral competition. Voters care about policy, but they also care about the identity of the party in power. These party preferences vary from person to person, but they are also correlated within each state. As a result, most states are...

Using US Census data for 1990-2000, we estimate effects of NAFTA on US wages, focusing on differences by gender. We find that NAFTA tariff reductions are associated with substantially reduced wage growth for married blue-collar women, much larger than the effect for other demographic groups. We...

We study the effect of globalization on the volatility of wages and worker welfare in a model in which risk is allocated through long-run employment relationships (the 'invisible handshake'). Globalization can take two forms: International integration of commodity markets (i.e., free trade) and...

The welfare effects of trade shocks depend crucially on the nature and magnitude of the costs workers face in moving between sectors. The existing trade literature does not directly address this, assuming perfect mobility or complete immobility, or adopting reduced-form approaches to estimation....