Despite its exclusion from the Doha agenda, the issue of trade and labor standards remains an intensely discussed subject among economists, policymakers, international agencies and nongovernmental organizations. In the past few years, both World Trade Organization (WTO) and International Labor...

Using a gravity model, we examine whether labor standards are important determinants of bilateral export performance for EU-15 countries over the period 1988-2001. We assess the conventional wisdom that countries with low labor standards and less stringent regulations have performed better in...