Rasmus Jørgensen
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Yale University & University of Copenhagen


Research Interests
International Trade, Industrial Organization and Applied Econometrics


Working Papers

The Wage Effect of Offshoring: Evidence from Danish Matched Worker-Firm Data

with David Hummels, Jakob R. Munch and Chong Xiang, October 2011.
Revise and resubmit at the American Economic Review.


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We estimate how offshoring and exporting affect wages by skill type. Our data match the population of Danish workers to the universe of private-sector Danish firms, whose trade flows are broken down by product and origin and destination countries. Our data reveal new stylized facts about offshoring activities at the firm level, and allow us to both condition our identification on within-job-spell changes and construct instruments for offshoring and exporting that are time varying and uncorrelated with the wage setting of the firm. We find that within job spells, (1) offshoring tends to increase the high-skilled wage and decrease the low-skilled wage; (2) exporting tends to increase the wages of all skill types; (3) the net wage effect of trade varies substantially across workers of the same skill type; and (4) conditional on skill, the wage effect of offshoring exhibits additional variation depending on task characteristics. We then track the outcomes for workers after a job spell and find that those displaced from offshoring firms suffer greater earnings losses than other displaced workers, and that low-skilled workers suffer greater and more persistent earnings losses than high-skilled workers.

Brazilian Exporter Dynamics Following the Argentine Crisis
with Rafael Dix-Carneiro.

[Available upon request]

This paper investigates how Brazilian exporters responded to the Argentine economic crisis in 2001-02. Using detailed customs data from Brazil, we explore the various margins of adjustment which have been suggested by a recent literature on multiproduct firms in international trade. Our findings show that the churning of firms and varieties explain only 1/3 of the sharp decline in total exports to Argentina, despite an extraordinary reduction in the number of exporting firms and varieties exported to Argentina. The relative importance of the different margins of trade adjustment varies with exporter size. While the smallest exporters exit exporting to Argentina entirely, the largest firms adjust primarily by exporting less of their continuing varieties and to some extent by contracting their product range. This paper also documents that Brazilian firms increased their export sales relatively more in the rest of the world for the varieties with declining sales in Argentina during the 2002-crisis compared to the products which only sold in other international markets. This is evidence that firms substituted export sales between market in response to the Argentine crisis.


  Curriculum Vitae

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  Yale University
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