A widely held view among the public is that trade liberalization increases unemployment. Using state and industry-level unemployment and trade protection data from India, we find no evidence of any unemployment increasing effect of trade reforms. In fact, our state-level analysis reveals that...

We examine the impact of trade reforms initiated in 1991 on labor's share in revenue among a sample of Indian firms. Theoretically, trade reforms will affect this share by reducing firm-level price–cost markups as well as the bargaining power of workers. A simple model suggests that these...