The effects on the US labour market due to changes in the global export exposure

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Economics - International Economic Relations, grade: 1,0, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: The following work presents the main results of the article 'US Exports and Employment' by Robert C. Feenstra, Hong Ma and Yuan Xu from September 2017. Moreover, this work will focus on the underlying econometric methodology and will discuss possible weaknesses. Further, the author examines the scientific potential of the article and its contribution to science. The authors of the article used instrument variables regressions to examine the unbiased effects of the change in the US industry level import penetration from China and the change of US global industrial export exposure on US employment. Increasing imports from China have been the subject of massive critics from the White House and in particular from President Donald Trump. One often repeated argument in favour of hampering imports from China has been the job losses in the manufacturing sector due to import competition. Although, various papers focus on job reducing effects of surging imports from China and the theory that export exposure creates jobs is well accepted, the effects on the US labour market due to changes in global export exposure had not been examined yet.