Overview
Professor of International Trade and Labor Markets at the University of Zurich and CEPR research affiliate. Works on the labor market effects of globalization and technological change, with particular focus on trade-induced job displacement, wage polarization, and their social consequences. Core contributor to the Autor-Dorn-Hanson "China Syndrome" research program.
Key Contributions / Features
- China Syndrome (Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2013a): Co-developed the foundational Bartik-IV identification of China trade shock effects on U.S. local labor markets; showed that CZs more exposed to Chinese import competition suffered substantial, persistent employment losses.
- China trade shock synthesis (Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2016): Review article in Annual Review of Economics formalizing the Bartik-IV in a gravity framework, presenting complete CZ-level coefficient table (Table 4), Figure 7 transfer cascade, and worker-level trapping evidence from SSA data. Demonstrates that pre-2000 consensus on trade and labor markets fails on all three pillars. See China Trade Shock.
- Manufacturing decline and family structure (Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2019): Extended the China shock design with gender-specific instruments to show that male-intensive trade shocks reduce marriage, raise male idleness and mortality (D&A, HIV/AIDS, homicide), and increase child poverty. See Marriage Market and Deaths of Despair.
- Labor market polarization (Autor and Dorn 2013): With David Autor, documented the growth of low-skill service jobs alongside high-skill professional jobs at the expense of middle-skill routine jobs — the "polarization" of the U.S. labor market.
- Commuting zones (Dorn 2009): Dorn's 2009 dissertation introduced commuting zones — Tolbert-Sizer (1996) county clusters defined by commuting flows — as the standard local labor market unit in economics. CZs are now the default geographic unit in the China Syndrome papers, Chetty et al. (2014c), and many other literatures.
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