Greg C. Wright

Standard monopsony estimates rely on external separations, but firms also suppress internal mobility—promotions and raises—when workers cannot credibly threaten to leave. Using LinkedIn career histories matched to H-1B visa records, I show that visa constraints at PERM filing reduce internal mobility by 58–65 percent alongside the well-documented external decline. A two-channel decomposition reveals that 29–37 percent of the total mobility decline flows through the internal channel, implying that external-only estimates understate welfare costs by 33–39 percent. The co-decline is general across occupation, education, and wage level.

We estimate the short- and long-run local labor market impacts of the large increase in U.S. imports and exports that occurred over the 1970s. We exploit the sequential opening of overseas shipping container ports over the period, which generated export and import shocks that were largely non-overlapping across U.S. labor markets thereby providing substantial variation to distinguish their effects. We find that the average net impact on the employment-to-population ratio was positive and concentrated in the initial decade, with little longer-run impact. At the same time, in-migration due to the export shock greatly exceeded out-migration due to the import shock. We show that these different migration responses were largely due to asymmetry in the housing supply curve. The largest gains accrued to residents of labor markets that simultaneously experienced a relatively large export shock, had a relatively low housing supply elasticity, and had a relatively high home-ownership rate.

We estimate the effects of in-utero exposure to a trade embargo on survival and human capital in an import-dependent developing country. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that a nearly comprehensive embargo imposed by India on Nepal in 1989 led to a large decline in reported live births, and increased early life mortality. The decline in births is concentrated in poorer, more remote districts, and is sharper for female births than male births, consistent with documented gender discrimination. Women survivors of exposure are more educated in adulthood than unexposed cohorts.

Using a registered pre-analysis plan, we survey college students during California's stay-at-home order to test whether compliance with social distancing requirements depends on primary preferences and characteristics that affect their marginal benefit from doing so. We find a quarter of students violated the order. Yet, neither risk preference, altruism, nor preexisting health conditions were predictive of compliance. Our findings raise doubt about the efficiency of minimally enforced social distancing policies, as well as commonly assumed motivations for compliance. Our results also imply that those with preexisting health conditions may not voluntarily comply, resulting in higher health care congestion than otherwise expected.

The extent to which firms respond to labor supply shocks has important implications for local and national economies. We exploit firm-level panel data on product and process innovation activities in the United Kingdom and find that the large, unanticipated, low-skill labor supply (immigration) shock generated by the 2004 expansion of the European Union to Eastern European countries increased process innovation and reduced product innovation, with overall innovation activity going up. This implies that the innovation response to labor supply shocks may be more nuanced than the previous literature has suggested. Both of these effects are increasing in the low-skill intensity of firm production. In addition, the reduction in product innovation is lessened for firms whose output is sold locally, which is consistent with a demand side effect generated by the labor supply shock.

A key feature of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is that they increase the size of the market or the scale of operation for workers in some occupations. We model the scale of operation as the limit up to which the production technology displays increasing returns to scale. We then explore the implications of this feature of ICT for the income distribution within affected occupations, as well as for individuals' occupational choices. Within occupations, an increase in the scale of operation intensifies competition between workers and increases inequality. It also drives the lowest-ability workers out of the occupation while reducing the earnings of the next lowest-ability workers when the substitutability between the output of the affected occupations and that of the rest of the economy is low.

In this paper we focus on a new channel of adaptation to trade liberalization, namely the shift toward increased provision of services in lieu of goods production. We exploit variation in EU trade policy to show that lower manufacturing tariffs lead firms to shift into services provision and out of goods production. We also find that a successful transition is associated with higher firm-level R&D stocks.

This paper explores the impact of immigrants on the imports, exports and productivity of service-producing firms in the U.K. Immigrants may substitute for imported intermediate inputs (offshore production) and they may impact the productivity of the firm as well as its export behavior. We test the predictions of our model using differences in immigrant inflows across U.K. labor markets, instrumented with an enclave-based instrument that distinguishes between aggregate and bilateral immigration, as well as immigrant diversity. We find that immigrants increase overall productivity in service-producing firms, revealing a cost cutting impact on these firms. Immigrants also reduce the extent of country-specific offshoring, consistent with a reallocation of tasks and, finally, they increase country-specific exports, implying an important role in reducing communication and trade costs for services.

We study the short-run, causal effect of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) adoption on the employment and wage distribution. We exploit a natural experiment generated by a tax allowance on ICT investments and find that the primary effect of ICT is to complement non-routine, cognitive-intensive work. We also find that the ICT investments led to organizational changes that were associated with increased inequality within the firm and we discuss our findings in the context of theories of ICT adoption and wage inequality. We find that tasks-based models of technological change best fit the patterns that we observe.

The productivity gains due to offshoring may, in part, accrue to workers. This paper estimates the magnitude of these gains and compares it to the magnitude of employment loss due to worker displacement. A model based on the production task framework from Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) is used to demonstrate that the effect of offshoring depends on the intensity of use of these tasks and, ultimately, impacts domestic employment through three channels: a direct displacement effect, which negatively impacts employment; an output effect generated by the productivity gains from offshoring, which reorganizes and increases aggregate production in the economy and impacts domestic employment positively; and a substitution effect among factors and tasks, which has an ambiguous effect. Using the model's structure as a roadmap and applying it to detailed U.S. manufacturing sector data over 2001-2007, results from GMM 3SLS regressions provide overall support for the structure and predictions of the tasks model of offshoring. In particular, the economic magnitude of the productivity gains is found to have been important.

Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the effects of immigration and offshoring on U.S. native-born workers. We find that immigrant and native-born workers do not compete much due to the fact that they tend to perform tasks at opposite ends of the task complexity spectrum, with offshore workers performing the tasks in the middle. A null effect of offshoring and a positive effect of immigration on native-born employment suggest that immigration and offshoring improve industry efficiency.