Industry affiliation provides an important channel through which trade liberalization can affect worker earnings and wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers. This empirical study of the impact of the 1988-94 trade liberalization in Brazil on the industry wage structure suggests...

The last two decades have witnessed a shift in the focus of international trade research from trade policy to other forms of trade frictions (e.g., transportation, information and communication costs). Implicit in this development is the widespread view that trade policy no longer matters. We...

We document several facts about workforce transitions from the informal to the formal sector in Vietnam, a fast growing, industrializing, and low-income country. First, younger workers, particularly migrants, are more likely to work in the formal sector and stay there permanently. Second, the...

We study the effects of a positive export shock on labor allocation between the informal, microenterprise sector and the formal firm sector in a low-income country. The U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement led to large reductions in U.S. tariffs on Vietnamese exports. We find that the share of...

We examine the role of structural change in the economic development of Vietnam from 1990 to 2008. Structural change accounted for a third of the growth in aggregate labor productivity during this period, which averaged 5.1 percent per annum. We discuss the role of reforms in agriculture,...

This paper examines how prices, markups and marginal costs respond to trade liberalization. We develop a framework to estimate markups from production data with multi-product firms. This approach does not require assumptions on the market structure or demand curves faced by firms, nor...

New goods play a central role in many trade and growth models. We use detailed trade and firm-level data from a large developing economy--India--to investigate the relationship between declines in trade costs, the imports of intermediate inputs and domestic firm product scope. We estimate...

Recent theoretical work predicts that an important margin of adjustment to deregulation or trade reforms is the reallocation of output within firms through changes in their product mix. Empirical work has accordingly shifted its focus towards multi-product firms and their product mix decisions....

Do the short and medium term adjustment costs associated with trade liberalization influence schooling and child labor decisions? We examine this question in the context of India's 1991 tariff reforms. Overall, in the 1990s, rural India experienced a dramatic increase in schooling and decline in...

Edmonds and Pavcnik consider how product market integration in a country's primary agricultural export alters the economic activities of men and women in a poor economy. Between 1993 and 1997, Vietnam relaxed its rice export quota and freed internal restrictions on the trade of rice across...