Robots and Reshoring: Evidence from Mexican Labor Markets (single-authored, JMP)
Abstract: Robots in advanced economies have the potential to reduce employment in offshoring countries by fueling reshoring. Using robots instead of humans for production may lower the relative cost of domestic production and, in turn, reduce demand for imports from offshoring countries. I analyze the impact of robots on employment in an offshoring country, using data from Mexican local labor markets between 1990 and 2015. Recent literature estimates the effect of robots on local employment by regressing the change in employment on exposure to domestic robots in local labor markets. I construct a similar measure of exposure to foreign robots, based on the initial geographic distribution of export-producing employment across industries, industry-level robot adoption in the US, and a US industry’s initial reliance on Mexican imports. To purge results from endogeneity, I use robot adoption in the rest of the world and an index of offshoring as instruments for robot adoption in the US and the share of Mexican imports, respectively. Using these instruments, I show that US robots have a sizeable negative impact on employment in Mexico. This negative effect is stronger for men than for women, and strongest for low-educated machine operators in the manufacturing sector. Consistently with reshoring as a mechanism, I find that the employment effect is mirrored in similarly large reductions in Mexican exports and export-producing plants.

The Impact of Technology and Trade on Migration: Evidence from the US (with A. Sarto and M. Tabellini)
Abstract: Migration has long been considered one of the key mechanisms through which labor markets adjust to economic shocks. In this paper, we analyze the migration response of American workers to two of the most important shocks that have hit Western economies since the late 1990s – import competition from China and the introduction of industrial robots. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure across US local labor markets over time, we first verify that both shocks led to a steep reduction in manufacturing employment. Next, we present our main results, and show that, on average, robots caused a sizable reduction in population size, whereas trade with China did not. The decline in population size due to robots resulted from reduced in-migration into rather than increased out-migration away from affected areas. In the second part of the paper, we explore the mechanisms behind these results. We show that the two labor market shocks differ in their propagation across industries within local labor markets: while robots caused negative spillovers to service industries, Chinese imports, if anything, favored employment growth outside of manufacturing. We provide suggestive evidence that these propagation patterns are responsible for the differential migration response.