Trade liberalization is no Pareto-improvement - there are winners (high-skilled) and losers (low-skilled). To compensate the losers the government is assumed to introduce unemployment benefits (UB). These benefits are financed by either a wage tax, a payroll tax, or a profit tax. Using a...

How does a redistribution of trade gains affect welfare when income inequality matters? To answer this question, we extend the [1] model to unionized labor markets and heterogeneous workers. As redistribution schemes, we consider unemployment benefits that are financed either by a wage tax, a...

Trade unions are typically able to convert their industrial power into political power. We show that, depending on the parameter constellation, stronger trade unions may be welfare-improving in terms of an increase in aggregate employment and output, if they successfully lobby for lower trade...

Trade unions are typically able to convert their industrial power into political power. We show that, depending on the parameter constellation, stronger trade unions may be welfare-improving in terms of an increase in aggregate employment and output, if they successfully lobby for lower trade...

Motivation -- International trade and unemployment - the worker-selection effect -- Unemployment benefits as redistribution scheme for trade gains- a positive analysis -- An optimal redistribution scheme for trade gains.

Trade liberalization is no Pareto-improvement - there are winners (high-skilled) and losers (low-skilled). To compensate the losers the government is assumed to introduce unemployment benefits (UB). These benefits are financed by either a wage tax, a payroll tax, or a profit tax. Using a...

The contribution of this paper is to derive an optimal redistribution scheme for trade gains in the case of a government's objective function that explicitly accounts for the equity-efficiency trade-off. The government pays unemployment benefits (UB) either financed by a wage tax, a payroll tax...