Research
I am a trade economist by training. My research spans four related areas.
International organization of production. Beginning with my dissertation, I examine how firms organize themselves across borders and the consequences for labor.
Distributional effects of globalization. I study how trade, migration, and technology shape labor markets and the returns to labor and capital.
Production structure and economic performance. I investigate how the organization of production affects resilience, dynamism, and vulnerability to geoeconomic action.
Economics and security. I ask how economic and security objectives relate, and how policymakers manage the tension between them.
Across all four, I work empirically, mostly with firm- and transaction-level data.
Working papers
-
The Trade Effects of Loosening Export Controls
The 2013–2017 Export Control Reform moved the less sensitive majority of military products out of State Department licensing, where nearly every export needs an individually adjudicated license, to the lighter Commerce regime, on a schedule set years in advance. The main finding is an avoided decline. In a stacked difference-in-differences design, the decontrolled products held their world export share while comparable defense products lost about 29 percent of theirs, and their exports rose 15–17 log points relative to controls. The gain went to allied and defense-customer destinations; domestic output, employment, and patenting show no detectable response.
PDF -
Contract-Production Reliance and the Output Cost of Supply Disruption
Contract-production reliance, what U.S. manufacturers pay outside contractors for work on materials they own, is predominantly domestic and nearly orthogonal to import penetration, so reshoring is poorly aimed at it. Industries one standard deviation more reliant lost about 2.4% more output when COVID-19 hit; the loss persisted through 2023 and was followed by a durable decline in establishment counts driven by depressed entry rather than closures. The same design finds negative acute-2020 responses in five European countries and Japan.
PDF -
Elbows Up: Economic Coercion and U.S. Border Labor Markets in the 2025 Trade War
In early 2025 the United States imposed tariffs on Canada and paired them with statements questioning Canadian sovereignty; Canadians responded by sharply curtailing travel south. Across 390 U.S. metropolitan areas, leisure and hospitality employment fell by roughly 0.6% per standard deviation of predetermined land-crossing exposure, on the order of fifteen to thirty thousand jobs. The tariffed southern border, where crossings never fell, shows no gradient: the cost of the coercion fell inside the country that imposed it, concentrated in border communities.
PDF -
Beyond Security: The Trade Implications of Joining NATO
Article 2 of the North Atlantic Treaty commits members to economic collaboration but built no machinery for it, yet NATO accession is associated with higher trade among members on a scale that rivals deep trade agreements. On a bilateral panel covering 1948–2022 we ask what the premium is made of: it rises with product standardization and concentrates in standardized inputs, trade among members rose about ten percent relative to outside pairs during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and accession reorients joiners’ trade toward non-member U.S. treaty allies.
PDF -
Offshoring and the Decline in Labor-Market Dynamism
Instrumenting U.S. intermediate-goods offshoring with Chinese export-supply growth to other high-income countries, I find offshoring left a permanent but narrow mark on labor-market dynamism. Offshored tasks were not replaced, which shows up as permanently lower manufacturing employment, turnover, and churn, while the firm-side job-reallocation rate recovers by the mid-2010s. The mark is narrow: 99% of the identifying variation sits in computers and electronics, and offshoring accounts for roughly one percent of the economy-wide fall in job reallocation.
PDF -
The China Shock Revisited: Job Reallocation and Industry Switching in U.S. Labor Markets
Using confidential Census microdata, we revisit how the rise in Chinese import penetration reshaped U.S. local labor markets. Exposed markets reallocated jobs from manufacturing to services, much of it within firms; about 40% of the manufacturing job losses came from establishments switching their primary activity to services such as research, design, and wholesale. Reallocation concentrated in high-human-capital areas, and this differential adjustment accounts for roughly half of the divergence in employment growth between high- and low-skill regions.
NBER working paper
Peer-reviewed publications
-
The Labor Market Effects of Immigration Enforcement
Secure Communities, a police-based interior enforcement program rolled out across counties in 2008–13, decreased the employment of likely undocumented immigrants, both through deportations and through the responses of those who remained. Enforcement also lowered the employment and hourly wages of U.S.-born workers, consistent with higher labor costs reducing job creation and with a decline in local consumption.
Article Online appendix -
Intermediate Good Sourcing, Wages and Inequality: From Theory to Evidence
Labor market frictions shape where firms source intermediate production: matching costs govern whether production stays onshore, and the difficulty of assessing worker quality governs whether it stays inside the firm. The model predicts, and the data confirm, that the wage effects of offshoring depend on the type of offshoring (inter- versus intra-firm), the skill intensity of the industry, and the offshorability of the occupation.
Article -
Global Supply Chains, Firm Scope and Vertical Integration: Evidence from China
Using disaggregated customs records on Chinese processing exports, I measure where cities sit on the value chain and ask how supply-chain position shapes firm boundaries. Ownership of intermediate suppliers responds to the position of inputs and the substitutability of sequential production stages, consistent with Antràs and Chor (2013), and value added rises as production moves toward final assembly.
Article -
In Search of the Armington Elasticity
The elasticity of substitution between home and foreign goods anchors quantitative trade models, yet “macro” estimates between home and import goods routinely come in below the “micro” elasticity between foreign sources. Estimating both within a nested CES framework on U.S. production and trade data, we find no significant difference for about half of goods; for the rest the macro elasticity is genuinely lower, even at the same level of disaggregation.
NBER working paper
Work in progress
- “Redefining Economic Security: Conceptual Boundaries, Analytical Frameworks, and Policy Implications.”
- “Impact of Tariffs on Technology Competition: Evidence from the U.S. Data Center Buildout.”
- “Economic Impacts of the Revocation of Temporary Protected Status.”
- “Entrepreneurship and Immigration Enforcement.”
- “Origins of Factoryless Goods Producers.”