While FTA negotiations are proliferating, our paper shows that targeting the appropriate sector is crucial for generating employment opportunities subsequent to FTA. In particular, we show that, countering conventional wisdom, targeting skill-biased exports and not the sector that employs...

Latin American countries have some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. However, earnings inequality significantly changed over the last three decades, increasing during the 1980s and 1990s, declining sharply in the 2000s, and stagnating or even increasing in some countries...

We show that wage setting in the Colombian manufacturing industry is not fundamentally driven by labor productivity in contrast to the standard theoretical prediction. On the contrary, internal institutional arrangements – payroll taxation, the minimum wage or the price wedge between...

A growing body of research has contributed to understanding the labor market and political effects of globalization. This paper explores an overlooked aspect of trade-induced adjustments in the labor market: the institutional aspect. We take advantage of the two-tier collective bargaining...

A growing body of research has contributed to understanding the labor market and political effects of globalization. This paper explores an overlooked aspect of trade-induced adjustments in the labor market: the institutional aspect. We take advantage of the two-tier collective bargaining...

After the tragic factory collapse of Rana Plaza in 2013, both the direct reforms and indirect responses of retailers have plausibly affected workers in the Ready Made Garment (RMG) sector in Bangladesh. These responses included a minimum wage increase, high profile but voluntary audits, and an...

A growing body of research has contributed to understanding the labor market and political effects of globalization. This paper explores an overlooked aspect of trade-induced adjustments in the labor market: the institutional aspect. We take advantage of the two-tier collective bargaining...

While FTA negotiations are proliferating, our paper shows that targeting the appropriate sector is crucial for generating employment opportunities subsequent to FTA. In particular, we show that, countering conventional wisdom, targeting skill-biased exports and not the sector that employs...

Germany exhibits a strong reduction in domestic manufacturing production depth (bazaar effect). I argue that this reflects an unbundling of comparative advantage. Using a model where Ricardian plus Heckscher-Ohlin-type comparative advantage relates to fragments of production, I compare a trading...

The competitive allocation of labor across different sectors of an economy may not be socially optimal when one sector uses foreign capital. We argue that a suitably designed government intervention is required to restrict the sectors to their optimal size and maximize national welfare. Such a...