From Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, Brendan Price:
Even before the Great Recession, U.S. employment growth was unimpressive. Between 2000 and 2007, the economy gave back the considerable jump in employment rates it had achieved during the 1990s, with major contractions in manufacturing employment being a prime contributor to the slump. The U.S. employment “sag” of the 2000s is widely recognized but poorly understood. In this paper, we explore an under-appreciated force contributing to sluggish U.S. employment growth: the swift rise of import competition from China. We find that the increase in U.S. imports from China, which accelerated after 2000, was a major force behind recent reductions in U.S. manufacturing employment and that through input-output linkages with the rest of the economy this negative trade shock has helped suppress overall U.S. job growth.
