30 Minute Talks on Research: The World’s Rust Belts

This talk documents a study on the local employment consequences of the aggregate manufacturing decline in the US, Western Europe and Japan since the 1970s using a newly-assembled dataset. It shows a significant heterogeneity in employment growth across local labour markets in the decades following the start of manufacturing decline, even within the group of manufacturing capitals which were more strongly affected by the country-level trend. This talk will show a positive relation between local human capital at the start of manufacturing decline and employment performance in the following decades, particularly in knowledge intensive services. Overall, the estimates suggest that skills are important for local reinvention.

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The talk is based on a research project joint with L. Gagliardi (@GagliarL) at Bocconi U (@unibocconi) and E. Moretti at Berkeley (@berkeleyecon).

This talk will precede Should we trust survey findings? at 1pm with Professor Peter Lynn (ISER)