Essays On The Local Labor Market Effects Of Globalization

This dissertation consists of a series of papers studying the effect that globalization in its multiple forms has had on Mexican local labor markets. In Chapter 1, 'Trade Shocks and Mexican Local Labor Markets in the Great Recession', I study the role that international trade played in the transmission of the U.S. credit crisis to Mexican local labor markets. The economic opening process that Mexico started by opening up to international trade in the mid-1980s when it became a member of the GATT, and then reinforced in 1994 when NAFTA was enacted, has created a strong link between the business cycles of Mexico and the United States (Robertson, 2000). This trade-driven phenomenon has had significant consequences for Mexico's economic geography (Hanson, 1996). In particular, easier access to the U.S. market increased the level of dependence on exports to the U.S. for some Mexican municipalities. This increase in dependence was not homogenous throughout the country, mostly due to differences by municipality in transportation costs and industry specialization. This heterogeneity, plus the evolution of U.S. trade during the Great Recession (2007-2009), which involved a $40 billion drop in U.S. imports from Mexico, allows me to identify the role that these trade linkages played in the transmission of the crisis to Mexican local labor markets. I show that differences in manufacturing industry structure caused by Mexico's opening process have made a subset of Mexican municipalities especially vulnerable to economic events in the U.S. I find that Mexican regions that exported relatively more to the U.S. experienced large and significant differential effects when compared to municipalities more focused on the domestic market. Mexican regions with significant ties to the U.S. market experienced, during the crisis, a significantly larger decrease in employment and wages, and greater within local labor market adjustments than their less open counterparts, mainly characterized by large drops in manufacturing employment and significant increases in employment in the service and agricultural industries. Pursuing the same line of research, the second chapter of my dissertation explores 'The Effect of Chinese Import Competition on Mexican Local Labor Markets'. Recent estimates of the effect of globalization on labor markets have found that trade is having an increasingly larger impact on wage inequality. Particularly relevant is the "China Syndrome" study by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013a), which presents evidence on the disruptive effects that import competition can have on a developed economy by estimating the impact that Chinese import competition had on U.S. local labor markets. One would expect to find that Chinese exports also had a large and significant effect on developing economies, particularly on those specialized in the production of labor-intensive goods. My paper contributes to the study of this relationship by analyzing the Mexican case. Following the methodology introduced in Autor et al. (2013a), I exploit variation across Mexican regions in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization in order to estimate the effect Chinese competition had on local Mexican labor markets. Also, by taking advantage of the Mexican exports' high dependence on the U.S. market, I estimate the effect that China-caused trade diversion had on Mexican labor markets. I find that the increase in competition decreased the employment share in manufacturing for the average Mexican local labor market. This effect was found to be larger for regions with high exposure to Chinese competition in the U.S. market, showing that there was a significant, negative indirect effect from China's trade growth. Workers' mobility also increased due to this negative shock. I name the third chapter 'Mexican Migrants' Response to a Trade Shock'. This study exploits the variation created by Chinese import competition across Mexican states and combines it with variation across U.S. states in their likelihood of receiving Mexican migrants in order to yield a causal estimate of the variation in the Mexican share of the labor force across U.S. states. The purpose of this study is both to determine whether international migration can be affected by external trade shocks, a topic very scantily studied in the economic literature of both trade and migration, and to open the doors to a study of migration effects on the receiving economy by using a plausibly exogenous shock to migration, as is the increase in import competition by China. I find that the increase in Mexican imports from China had a significant effect on Mexican workers' mobility towards the U.S. labor markets.