Gordon Hanson

About

Gordon Hanson is the Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and serves as the Academic Dean for Strategy and Engagement at the same institution. He is renowned for his research on the labor market consequences of globalization, particularly his pioneering work on the China trade shock. His current research explores the causes and consequences of regional job loss, the effectiveness of place-based policies in alleviating regional economic distress, and the impact of the energy transition on local labor markets. This research is part of the Reimagining the Economy project at Harvard Kennedy School, which he co-directs with Dani Rodrik. Hanson's scholarship also addresses immigration, the globalization of production, and economic geography. He has published extensively in leading economics journals, is widely cited across the social sciences, and is frequently quoted in major media outlets. Hanson is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has served as co-editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Development Economics. He earned his PhD in economics from MIT in 1992 and his BA in economics from Occidental College in 1986. Before joining Harvard in 2020, Hanson spent two decades at UC San Diego, where he held the Pacific Economic Cooperation Chair in International Economic Relations and was the founding director…

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Demography
• Economics
• Geography
• Biology
• Demographic economics
• Law

Selected publications

• Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure

  American Economic Review · 2020 · 1041 citations

  Has rising import competition contributed to the polarization of US politics? Analyzing multiple measures of political expression and results of congressional and presidential elections spanning the period 2000 through 2016, we find strong though not definitive evidence of an ideological realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the divisive 2016 US presidential election. Exploiting the exogenous component of rising import competition by China, we find that trade e…

  DOI

• Local Labor Market Impacts of the Energy Transition: Prospects and Policies

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-01-01 · 57 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Society’s transition toward more sustainable energy sources is well underway. But substantially reducing the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity, to power vehicles, and to manufacture the stuff of everyday life will profoundly disrupt the communities that currently dedicate themselves to carbon-intensive industries. In this paper, I consider the potential for adverse labor market consequences from the energy transition and the suitability of existing policies to counteract them. Top of m…

  PublisherDOI

• Help for the Heartland? The Employment and Electoral Effects of the Trump Tariffs in the United States

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-01-01 · 47 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  We study the economic and political consequences of the 2018-2019 trade war between the United States, China and other US trade partners at the detailed geographic level, exploiting measures of local exposure to US import tariffs, foreign retaliatory tariffs, and US compensation programs.The trade-war has not to date provided economic help to the US heartland: import tariffs on foreign goods neither raised nor lowered US employment in newly-protected sectors; retaliatory tariffs had clear negati…

  PublisherDOI

• Using Neural Networks to Predict Microspatial Economic Growth

  American Economic Review Insights · 2022 · 9 citations

  We apply deep learning to daytime satellite imagery to predict changes in income and population at high spatial resolution in US data. For grid cells with lateral dimensions of 1.2 km and 2.4 km (where the average US county has dimension of 51.9 km), our model predictions achieve R 2 values of 0.85 to 0.91 in levels, which far exceed the accuracy of existing models, and 0.32 to 0.46 in decadal changes, which have no counterpart in the literature and are 3–4 times larger than for commonly used ni…

  PublisherDOI

• Help for the Heartland? The Employment and Electoral Effects of the Trump Tariffs in the United States

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Dorn

  245 shared

• David Autor

  212 shared

• Robert C. Feenstra

  University of California, Davis

  67 shared

• Matthew J. Slaughter

  Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research

  64 shared

• Kenneth F. Scheve

  40 shared

• Gary P. Pisano

  31 shared

• Craig McIntosh

  University of California, San Diego

  31 shared

• Pian Shu

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  31 shared

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