Trade relations between the United States and China have grown increasingly tense, spurred by concerns that growing imports from China have led to plant closures and job loss in the United States. We find a link between the sharp decline in U.S. manufacturing employment after 2000 and the granting of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to China, which eliminated uncertainty about China‘s continued access to the U.S. market. Our research into the reactions of U.S. and Chinese firms to PNTR highlights the sensitivity of firm behavior to policy uncertainty.
labour market
Who benefits from corporate tax cuts? Evidence from local US labour markets
Quantifying who benefits from corporate tax cuts requires estimates of the effects of taxes on the local economy and on the location decisions of firms and workers. This research analyses every change in state business taxes in the United States since 1980 to show that the largest beneficiaries from a tax cut are the owners of firms (40%), with landowners and workers splitting the remaining (60%) of the economic gains. Where the benefits of corporate tax cuts fall ultimately depends on the relative mobility of firms and workers – and many factors other than tax rates influence their choice of location.
Opportunity and access: how legal work status affects immigrant crime rates
Immigration policy continues to be a hotly debated issue in many developed countries around the world. A contentious point cited by many policymakers relates to the high crime rates of immigrants relative to the native population. How does work status and legal access to the labor market affect the crime rates of immigrants? This article summarizes recent research from Pinotti (2017) on the Italian immigration system and finds that a lack of legal work opportunities for immigrants contributes to higher rates of immigrant crime.
How tax rates influence the migration of superstar inventors
This paper shows that taxes affect the international location decisions of the best “superstar” inventors. Higher tax rates lead to a significantly lower share of superstar inventors remaining in their home country and a lower share of foreign superstar inventors who move to the country. This may have significant fiscal and innovation costs for a country that should be taken into account when setting tax policy.
Why small isn’t always beautiful: labor regulations and firm growth
Regulations often have unintended costs as well as intended benefits. France has a large number of labor market regulations that bind when a firm has 50 or more employees. These regulations are intended to help workers, but they also act as a tax on large firms. This discourages firms near the threshold from growing larger and producing more output. We calculate that these French labor regulations depress overall economic output by over 3%.
How much work can the long-term disabled do?
The number of people who receive long-term disability payments has grown rapidly in many countries, raising the question of whether it is possible for some of them to return to gainful employment. Analysing the impact of a major disability reform in the Netherlands, this research finds that long-term recipients of disability insurance were on average able to replace about 60% of lost benefits with labour income. This is evidence of substantial remaining work capacity among recipients and it suggests that there is scope for disability insurance reform to tap into this capacity.
The causes and consequences of US workers’ diverging locations by skill
The increase in spatial sorting of college and non-college workers into very different cities calls into question whether the large increases in wage inequality over the past three decades truly represents a similar increase in inequality in economic well-being. Since college graduates are paying much higher housing costs than lower skill workers, it is possible […]
Financial incentives and disability rates
Can financial incentives encourage disability program participants to work? Due to a lack of randomized experiments with well-defined treatment and control groups, there is little evidence on this question. This paper helps to fill the void by exploiting a policy change in the Norwegian disability system that approximates a well-controlled policy experiment. The results show that financial incentives induce many disability recipients to work, enough so that overall program costs fall in spite of the added financial incentives. The analysis points to the possibility that incorporating financial incentives into the U.S. disability system could achieve similar results.
