The rise in world trade since 1970 has raised international mobility of labor services. We study the effect of such a globalization of the world's labor markets. We find that when people can choose between wage work and managerial work, the output gains are U-shaped: A worldwide labor market...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...