Recent estimates of the U.S. economic gains that would result from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are very small — only 0.13 percent of GDP by 2025. Taking into account the un-equalizing effect of trade on wages, this paper finds the median wage earner will probably lose as a...

Employees of globalized firms face a more uncertain stream of earnings and riskier employment prospects. However, they also have stronger incentives to train and upgrade their skills and benefit from more rapid careers. Hence, the costs of uncertainty and the benefits of skill upgrading...

The COVID-19 is having an unprecedented impact in the commercial and trade sphere globally. Businesses of all sizes are finding it difficult to operate efficiently and many struggle to meet contractual obligations. Agency is a ubiquitous concept in trade and commerce. The sudden implosion of...

Conventional trade theory, which combines the Heckscher-Ohlin theory and the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, implies that expanded trade between developed and developing countries will increase wage inequality in the developed countries. This theory is widely applied. It serves as the basis for...

The labor share in Europe has been on a downward trend. This paper finds that the decline is concentrated in manufacture and among low- to mid-skilled workers. The shifting nature of employment away from full-time jobs and a rollback of employment protection, unemployment benefits and...

This paper reviews the effects of trade liberalisation on wages in developing countries, and presents new evidence for Brazil. Wages fell substantially in the traded sector after trade liberalisation, consistent with there being reduced rents as industries faced greater competition. After trade...

This paper first reviews theoretical and empirical studies of the effects of trade liberalisation on wages in developing countries. It then presents new evidence for the case of Brazil which experienced a period of rapid trade liberalisation at the beginning of the 1990s. Conditional on...

This paper aims to explain that distance may not always be harmful for international trade, unlike the explanations provided by the gravity model. In case of service trade distance may be helpful instead, because of the existence of non-overlapping time zones between two trading countries. So,...

This paper presents firm- level evidence on the dynamics of the relative demand for non-manual workers in Italian manufacturing during the 1990s. The analysis provides a number of interesting results. First, within-firm skill upgrading is the main determinant of the increase in the non-manual...

How do labor markets adjust to trade liberalization? Leading models of intraindustry trade (Krugman (1981), Melitz (2003)) assume homogeneous workers and full employment, and thus predict that all workers win from trade liberalization, a conclusion at odds with the public debate. Our paper...