Recent theoretical work tends to characterize multinational enterprises as arising through either horizontal or vertical foreign direct investment (FDI). Empirical research tends to find stronger support for the former than for the latter. In this paper, we use recent, detailed data on U.S....

Recent literature on the labor-market effects of U.S. immigration tends to find little correlation between regional immigrant inflows and changes in relative regional wages. In this paper we examine whether immigration, or endowment shocks more generally, altered U.S. regional output mixes as...

In this paper, we examine the impact of government enforcement of the U.S.-Mexican border on wages in the border regions of the United States and Mexico. The U.S. Border Patrol polices U.S. boundaries, seeking to apprehend any individual attempting to enter the United States illegally. These...

We develop an empirical framework to assess the importance of trade and technical change on the wages of production and nonproduction workers. Trade is measured by the foreign outsourcing of intermediate inputs, while technical change is measured by the shift towards high-technology capital such...

In this paper, I examine how the growth of offshore assembly in Mexico has affected manufacturing activity in U.S. border cities. Under the offshore assembly provision of the U.S. tariff schedule, goods that are assembled abroad using U.S.-manufactured components receive preferential tariff...

Abstract We evaluate the duration of the China trade shock and its impact on a wide range of outcomes over the period 2000 to 2019. The shock plateaued in 2010, enabling analysis of its effects for nearly a decade past its culmination. Adverse impacts of import competition on manufacturing...

Job choice by high-skilled foreign-born workers in the US correlates strongly with country of origin. We apply a Frechet-Roy model of occupational choice to evaluate the causes of immigrant sorting. In a gravity specification, we find that revealed comparative advantage in the US is stronger for...

We apply deep learning to daytime satellite imagery to predict changes in income and population at high spatial resolution in US data. For grid cells with lateral dimensions of 1.2km and 2.4km (where the average US county has dimension of 55.6km), our model predictions achieve R2 values of 0.85...

In this paper, we develop a simple empirical method to test two alternative versions of the Melitz (2003) model, one with global fixed export costs and one with bilateral fixed export costs. With global costs, import sales per product variety (relative to domestic sales per variety) are...

In this paper, I selectively review recent literature on illegal migration from Mexico to the United States. I begin by discussing methods for estimating stocks and flows of illegal migrants. While there is uncertainty about the size of the unauthorized population, new data sources make it...