Results 1 - 10
of
63
Trade Liberalization and Firm Productivity: The Case of India
, 2007
"... Using a panel of firm-level data, this paper examines the effects of India’s trade reforms in the early 1990s on firm productivity in the manufacturing sector, focusing on the interaction between this policy shock and industry, firm and environment characteristics. The rapid and comprehensive tariff ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 94 (7 self)
- Add to MetaCart
Using a panel of firm-level data, this paper examines the effects of India’s trade reforms in the early 1990s on firm productivity in the manufacturing sector, focusing on the interaction between this policy shock and industry, firm and environment characteristics. The rapid and comprehensive tariff reductions–part of an IMF-supported adjustment program with India in 1991–allow us to establish a causal link between inter-industry and inter-temporal variations in output tariffs, input tariffs, and effective rates of protection and consistently estimated firm productivity. Specifically, reductions in trade protectionism led to higher lev-els of firm productivity, with this effect strongest in industries that were import-competiting and were not subject to excessive domestic regulation. A significant productivity boost was generated by the lower tariffs on intermediate inputs as well. Interestingly, state-level char-acteristics, such as labor regulations, investment climate, and financial development, do not appear to influence the effect of trade liberalization on firm productivity. Finally there is strong suggestive evidence of complementarities between trade liberalization and industrial policies that encourage domestic competition.
Capital-skill complementarity and the skill premium in a quantitative model of trade.
, 2011
"... Abstract The skill premium has risen in many countries over the last 20 years. This increase could be a result of skill-biased technological change. It might also be the result of the standard Stolper-Samuelson e¤ect, which would raise the skill premium in some countries and reduce it in others. St ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 25 (3 self)
- Add to MetaCart
Abstract The skill premium has risen in many countries over the last 20 years. This increase could be a result of skill-biased technological change. It might also be the result of the standard Stolper-Samuelson e¤ect, which would raise the skill premium in some countries and reduce it in others. Still a third possibility is that a decline in trade costs fosters increasing trade in capital goods, raising the productivity of skilled relative to unskilled workers. I call this mechanism skill-biased trade. I construct a multi-country model of international trade with capital-skill complementarity that admits all these possibilities and estimate it over the period 1990-2007. The impact of skill-biased trade is much larger than that of Stolper-Samuelson e¤ects, and comparable to the e¤ect of skill-biased technical change, especially in developing countries. Reduction in trade costs explains approximately half of the predicted increase in the skill premium and decline in the relative price of capital goods in developing countries, while explaining approximately one-third of that in developed countries. Regarding welfare gains from trade, I empirically show that both skilled and unskilled labor gain from trade. I also …nd that capital-skill complementarity induces a positive relationship between the change in welfare and income inequality in open economy. JEL Classi…cations: F11, F14, F43, O33, O47.
Trade Adjustment and Human Capital Investments: Evidence from
- Indian Tariff Reform,” NBER Working Papers 12884, National Bureau of Economic Research
, 2007
"... Authorized for distribution by Arvind Subramanian ..."
(Show Context)
Trade Integration, Market Size, and Industrialization: Evidence from China's National Trunk Highway System.
, 2013
"... Abstract Large scale transport infrastructure investments connect both large metropolitan centers of production as well as small peripheral regions. Are the resulting trade cost reductions a force for the diffusion of industrial and total economic activity to peripheral regions, or do they reinforc ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 17 (1 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
Abstract Large scale transport infrastructure investments connect both large metropolitan centers of production as well as small peripheral regions. Are the resulting trade cost reductions a force for the diffusion of industrial and total economic activity to peripheral regions, or do they reinforce the concentration of production in space? This paper exploits China's National Trunk Highway System as a large scale natural experiment to contribute to our understanding of this question. The network was designed to connect provincial capitals and cities with an urban population above 500,000. As a side effect, a large number of small peripheral counties were connected to large metropolitan agglomerations. To address non-random route placements on the way between targeted city nodes, I propose an instrumental variable strategy based on the construction of least cost path spanning tree networks. The estimation results suggest that network connections have led to a reduction in GDP growth among non-targeted peripheral counties. This effect appears to be driven by a significant reduction in industrial output growth. Additional results present evidence in support of a trade based channel in the light of falling trade costs between peripheral and metropolitan regions.
The Transitional Costs of Sectoral Reallocation: Evidence from the Clean Air Act and the Workforce.” August 2012 version of working paper
, 2012
"... This article uses linked worker-firm data in the United States to estimate the transitional costs associated with reallocating workers from newly regulated industries to other sectors of the economy in the context of new environmental regulations. The focus on workers rather than industries as the u ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 16 (2 self)
- Add to MetaCart
This article uses linked worker-firm data in the United States to estimate the transitional costs associated with reallocating workers from newly regulated industries to other sectors of the economy in the context of new environmental regulations. The focus on workers rather than industries as the unit of analysis allows me to examine previously unobserved economic outcomes such as nonemployment and long-run earnings losses from job transitions, both of which are critical to understanding the reallocative costs associated with these policies. Using plant-level panel variation induced by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), I find that the reallocative costs of environmental policy are significant. Workers in newly regulated plants experienced, in aggregate, more than $5.4 billion in forgone earnings for the years after the change in policy. Most of these costs are driven by nonemployment and lower earnings in future employment, highlighting the importance of longitudinal data for characterizing the costs and consequences of labor market adjustment. Relative to the estimated benefits of the 1990 CAAA, these one-time transitional costs are small. JEL Codes: Q50, H41, R11. I.
of LaborThe Rise of the East and the Far East: German Labor Markets and Trade Integration
"... Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international resear ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 15 (0 self)
- Add to MetaCart
Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. IZA Discussion Paper No. 6685
Trade reform and regional dynamics: evidence from 25 years of brazilian matched employer-employee data
- National Bureau of Economic Research
"... We empirically study the dynamics of labor market adjustment following the Brazilian trade reform of the 1990s. We use variation in industry-specific tariff cuts interacted with initial regional industry mix to measure trade-induced local labor demand shocks, and then examine regional and individual ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 9 (0 self)
- Add to MetaCart
We empirically study the dynamics of labor market adjustment following the Brazilian trade reform of the 1990s. We use variation in industry-specific tariff cuts interacted with initial regional industry mix to measure trade-induced local labor demand shocks, and then examine regional and individual labor market responses to those one-time shocks over two decades. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we do not find that the impact of local shocks is dissipated over time through wage-equalizing migration. Instead, we find steadily growing effects of local shocks on regional formal sector wages and employment for 20 years. This finding can be rationalized in a simple equilibrium model with two complementary factors of production, labor and industry-specific factors such as capital, that adjust slowly and imperfectly to shocks. Next, we document rich margins of adjustment induced by the trade reform at the regional and individual level. Workers initially employed in harder hit regions face continuously deteriorating formal labor market outcomes relative to workers employed in less affected regions, and this gap persists even 20 years after the beginning of trade liberalization. Negative local trade shocks induce workers to shift out of the formal tradable sector and into the formal nontradable sector.
Trade Liberalization, the Price of Quality, and Inequality: Evidence from Mexican Store Prices ∗
, 2012
"... This paper considers a novel distributional channel of developing country trade liberalization that operates through differences in cost of living inflation between rich and poor households. Motivated by the observed pattern of vertical differentiation across Mexican households in consumption and pl ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 8 (3 self)
- Add to MetaCart
This paper considers a novel distributional channel of developing country trade liberalization that operates through differences in cost of living inflation between rich and poor households. Motivated by the observed pattern of vertical differentiation across Mexican households in consumption and plants in production, I consider quality choice as a channel that links differences in consumption baskets between the rich and the poor to differences in plant technologies and, thus, relative price changes. Guided by this theoretical framework, I draw on a new collection of microdata covering Mexican households, plants, and stores to estimate this channel empirically in the context of Mexico’s trade liberalization under NAFTA. In particular, I present evidence that cheaper access to US inputs reduces the relative price of higher quality products in Mexican cities. In turn, because richer households consume higher product quality, I find that this relative price effect has led to a significant increase in Mexican real income inequality due to NAFTA over the period 1994-2000.
Trade Adjustment: Worker Level Evidence,
, 2013
"... Abstract In the past two decades, China's manufacturing exports have grown spectacularly. U.S. imports from China have surged, while U.S. exports to China have increased more modestly, consistent with the two countries' divergent current account imbalances. Using data on individual earnin ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 5 (0 self)
- Add to MetaCart
(Show Context)
Abstract In the past two decades, China's manufacturing exports have grown spectacularly. U.S. imports from China have surged, while U.S. exports to China have increased more modestly, consistent with the two countries' divergent current account imbalances. Using data on individual earnings by employer from the Social Security Administration, we examine how workers in manufacturing industries exposed to import competition from China have faired in terms of labor income, employment, job mobility, and receipt of Social Security benets. Over the period 1992 to 2007, workers who in 1991 were employed in industries that experienced high subsequent levels of import growth have more years with zero labor earnings, lower cumulative earnings over the period, and a greater likelihood of receiving Social Security Disability Insurance as the only recorded source of income in a given year. More exposed individuals spend less time working for their intial employers, less time working in their intial two-digit manfuacturing industries, and more time working elsewhere in manufacturing. Eects on earnings and employment are much larger for women than for men, and also larger for individuals whose initial employers were relatively large, whose initial wages where below their rm's average, and who in the pre-sample period worked part time or intermittently. Individuals who work in regions more exposed to import growth (beyond their industry of employment) have more years with zero labor earnings as well. We obtain similar results using alternative measures of trade exposure. Our ndings suggest that there is signicant worker-level adjustment cost to import shocks and that adjustment is highly uneven across individuals according their conditions of employment in the pre-shock period.
External integration, structural transformation and economic development: Evidence from argentina 1870-1914. mimeo
, 2014
"... Meissner and Alan Taylor for sharing data. Responsibility for results, opinions and errors is the authors' alone. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for disc ..."
Abstract
-
Cited by 5 (1 self)
- Add to MetaCart
Meissner and Alan Taylor for sharing data. Responsibility for results, opinions and errors is the authors' alone. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
