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...

There is considerable debate over whether international trade has contributed to the declining economic fortunes of less skilled workers. One issue that has become lost in the current discussion is how firms respond to import competition and how these responses, in turn, are transmitted to the...

In this paper, we examine the increase in the relative wages of skilled workers in Mexico during the 1980s. We argue that rising wage inequality in Mexico is linked to capital inflows from abroad. The effect of these capital inflows, which correspond to an increase in outsourcing by...

In this paper we examine the reduction in the relative employment and wages of unskilled workers in the U.S. during the 1980's. We argue that a contributing factor to this decline was rising imports reflecting the outsourcing of production activities. In a theoretical model, we show that any...

In Mexico during the 1980s, the wages of more-educated, more- experienced workers rose relative to those of less-educated, less- experienced workers. We assess the extent to which the increase in the skilled-unskilled wage gap was associated with Mexico's recent trade reform. In particular, we...

Case studies of export behavior suggest that firms who penetrate foreign markets reduce entry costs for other potential exporters, either through learning by doing or through establishing buyer- supplier linkages. We pursue the idea that spillovers associated with one firm's export activity...

This paper proposes a methodology for defining urban markets based on economic activity detected by satellite imagery. We use nighttime lights data, whose use in economics is increasingly common, to define urban markets based on contiguous pixels that have a minimum threshold of light intensity....

The competitive shock to the U.S. manufacturing sector spurred by rising China import competition could either catalyze or stifle innovation. Using three distinct sources of variation to identify rising trade exposure, we provide a causal analysis of the effect of surging import competition on...

Two prominent features of international labor movements are that the more educated are more likely to emigrate (positive selection) and more-educated migrants are more likely to settle in destination countries with high rewards to skill (positive sorting). Using data on emigrant stocks by...

During the 1980s in Mexico the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers widened. The authors assess the extent to which this increased wage inequality was associated with Mexico's sweeping trade reform in 1985. Examining data on 2,354 Mexican manufacturing plants for 1984-90 and Mexican...