David Dorn's research interests include labour markets, globalization, technological change and innovation, inequality and social polarization.
Dorn, David Autor and Gordon Hanson find that rising imports from China caused higher unemployment, lower labour force participation and reduced wages in local U.S. labour markets that house manufacturing industries that compete with those imports, explaining up to a quarter of the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment.
[8] At the individual level, persons who worked in 1991 in manufacturing industries in which imports from China grew strongly experienced lower aggregate earnings and change firms and industries more often, with churning particularly concentrated among those who had low initial wages, tenure or labour force attachment, while high-wage workers are much better able to adjust in case they are forced out of their jobs.
[9] More generally, job losses in the U.S. due to rising competition from Chinese imports over 1999-2011 were estimated by Dorn, Autor, Hanson, Daron Acemoglu and Brendan Price to amount to 2–2.4 million,[10] with offsetting employment gains in other industries yet to materialize.
[11] Finally, while the impacts of trade with China grow in the 2000s as imports accelerate, labour markets in the U.S. with industries less exposed to Chinese trade but characterized by a high routine task content still experienced occupational polarization, first due to the automation of production activities in manufacturing and then due to the computerisation of information-processing tasks in non-manufacturing sectors.