When there is a problem in the economy, how do workers respond? “Traditional economists tend to think that if a factory shuts down, its workers simply move elsewhere,” Professor Sharon Traiberman says, “but there has been a sentiment in the public that that’s not true, and data is backing that up.”

Traiberman has been passionate about how workers navigate the economy ever since he was a teenager growing up in Saint Louis, the son of Russian Jews who immigrated from the Soviet Union when anti-Semitism was rife and the Soviet government allowed Jews to leave for Israel, where Traiberman was born. Traiberman’s father was lucky. He was a computer programmer in the 80s, right when the telecommunications industry experienced great growth, and he was willing to be mobile. The family moved from Israel to Canada to the America, where they lived in various states. Traiberman made friends with other immigrants, and believes that this made him more attuned to the power of globalization.

Traiberman now realizes that his father benefited in the 80s from what eludes many people today: the right skills in a shifting economy. Traiberman’s doctoral thesis at Princeton University, “Occupations and Import Competition” (published in the American Economic Review), shows the importance of job-related skills that workers develop, and how changing occupations can be costly. If a factory closes and a machinist becomes an Uber driver, his job-specific experience becomes meaningless. He will suffer financially. “These experience-costs,” Traiberman says, “can help explain both why workers are reluctant to adjust to trade ‘shocks,’ as well as explain why some workers have gained, while others have lost, over the last few decades of globalization.” In other words, it’s not always easy to change jobs.

This has been understood for some time, but quantifying what happens to workers when their experiences and skills are no longer marketable is a difficult task.   After all, there are many theories and stories for why workers struggle to adjust to globalization: it could be that some workers just do not have the skills for the modern economy; it could also be that finding jobs in all new industries or places is particularly difficult; or it could be psychological, with some workers struggling in different environments. All these stories point to different policies for us to consider. Traiberman is an empiricist and he blends models and data to try and account for these possibilities at once: how people change jobs within an industry, how industries change in response to the economy, and how to capture the way workers differ in their ability to perform different jobs, both when they begin their careers and as they accumulate experience.

His model is tricky to execute and immediately valuable. It accounts for broad sea-changes in a globalized economy. It makes legible the pain of an unemployed machinist who is advised to enter the tech industry---measuring the costs of deprecated skills, the costs of entering a new field, and the loss in income from having to restart a career with little experience. He finds that workers are not reluctant to change their occupation because finding a new job is hard; rather workers do not want to lose valuable (and hard to teach) experience. This has ramifications for how policymakers craft labor market policy: retraining programs are unlikely to make up for these years of hard-earned on-the-job skills.

The elephant in the room is the 2016 presidential election and the rise of Donald Trump. Many factors contributed to Trump’s success, not least voters in so-called “Rust Belt” states who felt that Trump spoke to mid-skilled workers struggling to adjust to a globalized economy, the decline of unions, and the rise of automation. The attention Trump gave to the Carrier air-conditioner factory in Indiana showed precisely the importance of Traiberman’s work. Economists, Traiberman believes, would do well to think more about people negatively affected by off-shoring and hyperglobization—and the choices they believe they must make. Although known for his theoretical prowess, Traiberman can also be wisely humane. “I think people tend to know their situations well,” he says, “and so we should listen to them if they say they are struggling.”

In current work, Traiberman is expanding on his past model to think about the role of the trade deficit in the recent experience of manufacturing workers. Intuitively, if switching jobs is costly, but demand is not there, workers might exit employment or take much lower wages. A trade deficit, spurred by an excess of foreign saving , can exacerbate these problems. Typical intuition is that these imbalances should not matter, since foreign saving today means higher foreign demand later. But, in the real world, workers dislocated in the short run, and the workers who are employed later, are not the same.

Not one to focus narrowly on complicated models for his research, replete with simplifying assumptions, Traiberman tries his best to let the data speak for itself. In complementary work to his research agenda on how workers reallocate in response to import competition, Traiberman tries to understand the actual frictions facing workers. For example, does one’s choice of major in college open up a wide range of opportunities or force someone into a narrow band of occupations? And, do workers with different personality traits exhibit different patterns of reallocation? In current preliminary work, Traiberman and his coauthors have found that globalization has been harder to navigate for workers with low grit, and easier for those who identify as open to new experiences.

            Traiberman’s work is at once focused on human experience and wide economic forces. It has large implications for how we will predict the shifts of trade and decide educational policy in response. Where will globalization go in the next ten to fifteen years? Where will things be made? How will people choose their occupations? Trade does not have to be a zero-sum game, but crafting a strategy for globalization in the 21st century requires models that can both speak to the negative lived experience of some folks, while highlighting the gains that come from bringing together people with different skills, ideas, and opportunities.