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David H. Autor

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and IZA, Germany

IZA World of Labor role

Author

Current position

Ford Professor of Economics and Associate Head, MIT, USA

Research interest

Human capital, skill demands, and earnings inequality, labor market and societal impacts of technological change and globalization, disability insurance and labor force participation, contingent and intermediated work arrangements

Website

https://economics.mit.edu/faculty/dautor

Qualifications

PhD Public Policy, Harvard University, 1999

Selected publications

  • “The China Shock: Learning from labor market adjustment to large changes in trade.” Annual Review of Economics 8 (2016): 205–240 (with D. Dorn and G. Hanson).

  • “Untangling trade and technology: Evidence from local labour markets.” The Economic Journal 125:584 (2015): 621–646 (with D. Dorn and G. Hanson).

  • “Trade adjustment: Worker level evidence.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129:4 (2014): 1799–1860 (with D. Dorn, G. Hanson, and J. Song).

  • “Skills, education and the rise of earnings inequality among the ‘other 99 percent.’” Science 344:6186 (2014): 843–851.

  • “The China syndrome: Local labor effects of import competition in the United States.” American Economic Review 103:6 (2013): 2121–2168 (with D. Dorn and G. Hanson).

article(s)

  • Trade and labor markets: Lessons from China’s rise

    The China Shock has challenged economists’ benign view of how trade integration affects labor markets in developed countries

    David H. Autor, February 2018
    Economists have long recognized that free trade has the potential to raise countries’ living standards. But what applies to a country as a whole need not apply to all its citizens. Workers displaced by trade cannot change jobs costlessly, and by reshaping skill demands, trade integration is likely to be permanently harmful to some workers and permanently beneficial to others. The “China Shock”—denoting China’s rapid market integration in the 1990s and its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001—has given new, unwelcome empirical relevance to these theoretical insights.
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