Unions are often stigmatized as being a source of inefficiency due to higher collective bargaining outcomes. This is in stark contrast with the descriptive evidence presented in this paper. Larger firms choose to export and are also more likely to adopt collective bargaining. We rationalize...

By studying the factors underlying differences in trade performance across European economies, this paper derives six different “trade models” for 22 EU-countries and explores their developmental and distributional dynamics. We first introduce a typology of trade models by clustering...

This study explores the impact of export shocks on firms and re-aggregates results to derive distributional effects on sectors and regions. In a first step, firm level data are used to assess the empirical relationship between exports and three outcome variables – labour productivity,...

This paper presents a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of trade liberalization on the labor markets of developing countries. We discuss models which seek to explain the empirical finding that openness has increased wage inequality in several developing countries....

In theoretical trade models with variable markups and collective wage bargaining, export exposure may reduce the exporter wage premium. We test this prediction using linked German employer-employee data from 1996 to 2007. To separate the rent-sharing mechanism from assortative matching, we...

Using establishment-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, we assess the market power of exporting firms across 16 countries in Latin America. Leveraging information on export destinations, as well as exchange rate and price data, we construct exchange rate-driven shocks to the...

In this paper I apply Porto (2006) to Paraguay using household level data. The aim is to assess the distributional impact of the preferential and multilateral trade liberalization in a small member country. I also follow Nicita (2009) assuming incomplete pass-through on prices of traded goods...

In this paper we survey the recent empirical literature on the effects of offshoring on wage, employment and displacement. We start with an overview of the measurement of offshoring, organizing our discussion around the three key elements of offshoring: that it involves intermediate inputs for...

This paper analyses the structure of Greek exports and presents policy recommendations to boost export performance. Despite recent improvements, export performance deteriorated in the last decade particularly in the service sector. The decline in unit labour costs since the beginning of the...

Many industrialized economies have seen a rapid rise in top income inequality and in the globalization of production since the 1980s. In this paper I propose an open economy model of executive pay to study how offshoring affects the pay level and incentives of top earners. The model introduces a...