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 of the Center on Global Transformation. He has also been on the economics faculties of the University of Michigan and the University of Texas.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Demography
• Economics
• Geography
• Biology
• Demographic economics
• Law
• Political economy
• Econometrics
• Geodesy
• Physics
• Mathematics
• Economic geography

Selected publications

• Does Border Enforcement Protect U.S. Workers From Illegal Immigration?

  World Scientific Studies in International Economics · 2026-04-01 · 1 citations

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, we examine the impact of enforcement of the U.S.-Mexico border on wages in U.S. and Mexican border regions. The U.S. Border Patrol polices U.S. boundaries, seeking to apprehend any undocumented entrants. It concentrates its efforts on the Mexican border. We examine labor markets in border areas of California, Texas, and Mexico. For each region, we have high-frequency data on wages and person hours the U.S. Border Patrol spends policing the border. For a range of empirical specifications and definitions of regional labor markets, we find little impact of border enforcement on wages in U.S. border cities and a moderate negative impact of border enforcement on wages in Mexican border cities. These findings are consistent with two hypothesis: (1) border enforcement has a minimal impact on illegal immigration, or (2) illegal immigration from Mexico has a minimal impact on wages in U.S. border areas.

  PublisherDOI

• Local Energy Access and Industry Specialization: Evidence from World War II Emergency Pipelines

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Places versus People: The Ins and Outs of Labor Market Adjustment to Globalization

  2025-05-09 · 2 citations

  preprint

  This chapter analyzes the distinct adjustment paths of U.S. labor markets (places) and U.S. workers (people) to increased Chinese import competition during the 2000s. Using comprehensive register data for 2000–2019, we document that employment levels more than fully rebound in trade-exposed places after 2010, while employment-to-population ratios remain depressed and manufacturing employment further atrophies. The adjustment of places to trade shocks is generational: affected areas recover primarily by adding workers to non-manufacturing who were below working age when the shock occurred. Entrants are disproportionately native-born Hispanics, foreign-born immigrants, women, and the college-educated, who find employment in relatively low-wage service sectors such as medical services, education, retail, and hospitality. Using the panel structure of the employer-employee data, we decompose changes in the employment composition of places into trade-induced shifts in the gross flows of people across sectors, locations, and non-employment status. Contrary to standard models, trade shocks reduce geographic mobility, with both in- and out-migration remaining depressed through 2019. The employment recovery stems almost entirely from young adults and foreign-born immigrants taking their first U.S. jobs in affected areas, with minimal contributions from cross-sector transitions of former manufacturing workers. Although worker inflows into non-manufacturing more than fully offset manufacturing employment losses in trade-exposed locations after 2010, incumbent workers neither fully recover earnings losses nor predominantly exit the labor market, but rather age in place as communities undergo rapid demographic and industrial transitions. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)

  PublisherDOI

• The U.S. Place-Based Policy Supply Chain

  2025-05-09 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Place-based policy in the United States comprises a wide range of government programs that are spread across federal, state, and local agencies and that rely on public, private, and nonprofit organizations for policy design and implementation. We document how loosely connected vertical policy supply chains distribute resources from federal and state governments to recipients at the local level. The apparatus is the product of 150 years of policy innovation, both from the top down, with the federal government periodically launching major initiatives whose place-based impacts tend to be long-lived (even if the specific policies are not), and from the bottom up, with state and local actors engineering their own policy solutions, many of which have endured and now constitute modern policy practice. That practice includes not just tax incentives for business investment, the subject of most economic research on place-based policy, but support for community redevelopment, workforce development, small business promotion, technological innovation, and regional planning and strategy. Intermediary organizations that connect government agencies to local recipients are central to resource delivery. Because they tend to be created, funded, and (or) run by non-state actors, there appears to be wide geographic variation in organizational capacity for place-based policy. Understanding the causes and consequences of that variation is needed for a full accounting of how place-based policy works in the U.S. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Local Energy Access and Industry Specialization: Evidence from World War II Emergency Pipelines

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-04-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  How does improving access to the supply of energy affect regional specialization in manufacturing?We evaluate the long-run employment impacts of pipelines constructed by the U.S. government during World War II to transport oil and gas from the oil fields of the Southwest to wartime industrial producers in the Northeast.The pipelines were built rapidly to connect end points along a direct path that minimized use of scarce construction materials.Postwar they were converted to supply en route customers, giving counties close to the pipelines access to a cheap and plentiful source of energy.Between 1940 and 1950, counties with better access to pipeline gas had larger increases in their share of employment in energy-intensive industries.These impacts persisted to the mid-1980s for all energy-intensive industries and to the late 1990s for the subset of industries intensive in the direct use of electricity, despite the disruptive effects of the 1970s energy crisis.Our findings are relevant for understanding energy-related path dependence in local economic development patterns and how government intervention in energy markets affects industry location in the short and long run.

  PublisherDOI

• Local energy access and industry specialization: Evidence from World War II emergency pipelines

  Explorations in Economic History · 2025-06-03 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  How does improving access to the supply of energy affect regional specialization in manufacturing? We evaluate the long-run employment impacts of pipelines constructed by the U.S. government during World War II to transport oil and gas from the oil fields of the Southwest to wartime industrial producers in the Northeast. The pipelines were built rapidly to connect end points along a direct path that minimized use of scarce construction materials. Postwar they were converted to supply en route customers, giving counties close to the pipelines access to a cheap and plentiful source of energy. Between 1940 and 1950, counties with better access to pipeline gas had larger increases in their share of employment in energy-intensive industries. These impacts persisted to the mid-1980s for all energy-intensive industries and to the late 1990s for the subset of industries intensive in the direct use of electricity, despite the disruptive effects of the 1970s energy crisis. Our findings are relevant for understanding energy-related path dependence in local economic development patterns and how government intervention in energy markets affects industry location in the short and long run.

  PublisherDOI

• Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? Changes in the Geography of Work in the U.S., 1980-2021

  2025-05-09

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We examine changes in the spatial distribution of good jobs across U.S. commuting zones over 1980-2000 and 2000-2021. We define good jobs as those in industries in which full-time workers attain high wages, accounting for individual and regional characteristics. The share of good jobs in manufacturing has plummeted; for college graduates, good jobs have shifted to (mostly tradable) business, professional, and IT services, while for those without a BA they have shifted to (nontradable) construction. There is strong persistence in where good jobs are located. Over the last four decades, places with larger concentrations of good job industries have tended to hold onto them, consistent with a model of proportional growth. Turning to regional specialization in good job industries, we find evidence of mean reversion. Commuting zones with larger initial concentrations of good jobs have thus seen even faster growth in lower-wage (and mostly nontradable) services. Changing regional employment patterns are most pronounced among racial minorities and the foreign-born, who are relatively concentrated in fast growing cities of the South and West. Therefore, good job regions today look vastly different than in 1980: they are more centered around human-capital-intensive tradable services, are surrounded by larger concentrations of low-wage, non-tradable industries, and are more demographically diverse. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Satellite Imagery to Detect the Impacts of New Highways: An Application to India

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access

  This paper integrates daytime and nighttime satellite imagery into a spatial general-equilibrium model to evaluate the returns to investments in new motorways.Our approach has particular value in developing-country settings in which spatially granular economic data are scarce.To demonstrate our method, we use publicly available imagery to evaluate India's road construction projects in the early 2000s.Estimating the model and evaluating welfare impacts only requires remotely-sensed data.We find that India's road investments improved aggregate welfare, particularly for the largest and smallest urban markets.Most welfare gains accrued within Indian districts-the unit of analysis in conventional approaches-which demonstrates the benefits of using of high-resolution satellite imagery.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Satellite Imagery to Detect the Impacts of New Highways: An Application to India

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Using Satellite Imagery to Measure the Impacts of New Highways: An Application to India

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  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