Theory and evidence suggest that people born in different countries complement each other in the labor market. Immigrant diversity could augment productivity by enabling the combination of different skills, ideas and perspectives, resulting in greater productivity. Using matched employer-employee data for the USA, this paper evaluates this claim, and makes empirical and conceptual contributions to prior work. It addresses the potential bias from unobserved heterogeneity among individuals, work establishments and cities. The paper also identifies diversity impacts at both city and workplace scales, and considers how relationships vary across different segments of the labor market. Findings suggest that urban immigrant diversity produces positive and nontrivial spillovers for U.S. workers. This social return represents a distinct channel through which immigration may generate broad-based economic benefits.

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Tracing the Thai cassava (Manihot esculenta) trade network, between 1960 and 2000, offers a compelling example of global complexity at work. The emergence of Thailand's dominance of world export markets caught the world by surprise. The opening up of a European market for cassava was supposed to be met by Brazilian and Indonesian producers. Instead, Thailand took over the market by 1975. Several factors facilitated this emergence including: entrepreneurial diasporic networks of Thai-Chinese traders, local political economy conditions in both Europe and Thailand, and ecological conditions in Thailand. These same factors also shaped the subsequent timing of the closing of the European market, the emergence of a new industry association, the creation of new cassava products, and the expansion to other markets. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of cassava market yielded equivocal outcomes for both Europe and Thai farmers.

This paper examines the role of international trade, and specifically imports from low-wage countries, in determining patterns of job loss in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2007. Motivated by intuitions from factor-proportions-inspired work on offshoring and heterogeneous firms in trade, we build industry-level measures of import competition. Combining worker data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics dataset, detailed establishment information from the Census of Manufactures, and transaction-level trade data, we find that rising import competition from China and other developing economies increases the likelihood of job loss among manufacturing workers with less than a high school degree; it is not significantly related to job losses for workers with at least a college degree.