We study the impact of child labor standards in Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) on a variety of child labor market outcomes, including employment, education, and household inequality. We develop a stylized general equilibrium model of child labor in an economy open to international trade and...

We ask how globalization affects a government's incentives to set labor standards for its workers. In a stylized equilibrium model of global value chains, we find two contrasting results. First, each country chooses stricter labor standards with globalization than it would under autarky, because...

In a stylized model of multinational firms choosing host locations for their global value chains, host-country governments choose the strength of collective-bargaining rights that allow their workers to receive a share of the resulting quasi-rents. Each government must trade off the direct...