Impact of Rising International Trade Costs on U.S. Workers by Demographic Group

Riker (2023) provides a modeling framework for estimating the exposure of different groups of U.S. workers to international trade using employment-weighted averages of the trade intensities of U.S. manufacturing industries. In this paper, we reapply this model in a retrospective analysis. We estimate the short-run impact of rising international trade costs on U.S. manufacturing imports from 2021 to 2022 on the employment of U.S. workers in groups defined by their race, sex, age, and educational attainment. We also introduce two extensions to the model. First, we quantify the dilution of the employment effects in an all-worker average that includes non-manufacturing workers. Second, we model the effects of changes in trade costs on imported intermediate goods, as well as changes in trade costs on imported final goods.