Anh Nguyen, Job Market Candidate

Title: De-localizing the Local Impacts of Trade through Migration: Evidence from Vietnam

Abstract: This paper studies how a labor market's exposure to trade shock can transcend its local boundary with the help of pre-existing migration network across regions. Leveraging the 2001 U.S-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) I provide a theory, and devise an empirical counterpart to argue for an important contribution of the migration-induced spillover effect from the BTA shock in (i) facilitating labor reallocation away from the agricultural and informal sector, (ii) improving earnings among the low-educated workers, and (iii) closing the education earnings gap. Additionally, the spillover effect on earnings growth is persistent over time with its magnitude eventually exceeds that of direct exposure by 2018. Further analysis on provincial poverty shows that these two types of exposure would have different timing on the poverty reduction outcome. A higher direct exposure to the BTA shock reduces the poverty rate immediately after the BTA went into effect, but this impact quickly subsides in a longer run. On the other hand, the poverty reduction effect of the spillover exposure slowly materializes and only turns significant 6 years after the BTA implementation.