Download or read book The Impact of Trade Liberalization On Firms Product and Labor Market Power written by Sabien Dobbelaere and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization on firms' product and labor market power. We estimate the prevalence and intensity of price-cost markups and either wage markups or wage markdowns, taking the dependence between these model-consistent measures of product and labor market power into account. Exploiting reductions in tariffs upon China's WTO accession, we find that trade liberalization has not switched firms away from exercising product and labor market power. Reducing input tariffs has increased firms' price-cost markups but decreased their wage-setting power. We reveal hetero-geneous trade liberalization effects on the intensity of firms' product and labor market power.

Download or read book The Impact of WTO Accession on Chinese Firms Product and Labor Market Power written by Sabien Dobbelaere and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines the impact of WTO membership on the extensive and intensive margins of product and labor market power of Chinese manufacturing firms during the period 1999- 2006. We first identify a firm's regime of competitiveness, corresponding to a combination of a product market setting and a labor market setting, at any point in time through implementing the testing procedure of Kodde and Palm (1986), the distance test. Our descriptive differencesin-differences analysis shows that an industry's dominant regime of competitiveness is stable over time. Exploiting variation in input and output tariff reductions after WTO accession across industries, we then show that on the extensive margin, reducing tariffs on intermediate inputs decreases the likelihood of shifting firms away from an imperfectly competitive labor market setting where the marginal employee is paid a real wage either above or below her marginal product (i.e. wage markup or markdown). In contrast, falling tariffs on final goods increases the likelihood of switching firms away from setting wage markdowns. On the intensive margin, trade liberalization via input tariff reductions is found to increase a firm's price-cost markup but to decrease the degree of wage-setting power that a firm possesses. Such joint responses of firms' pricing behavior to trade policy changes are important for understanding increased inter-firm wage disparities.

Download or read book Trade Liberalization Labor Markets and Imperfect Competition written by Devashish Mitra and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the recent empirical literature on the effects of trade reforms on firm level wages, employment and labor demand elasticities in import-competing sectors.

Download or read book Trade Liberalization Labor Market Power and Misallocation Across Firms written by Enze Xie and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study the effect of heterogeneous monopsony power across Chinese firms on the equilibrium allocation of labor. Based on the fact that heterogeneity in monopsony power results from the heterogeneity in workers' preferences for the jobs provided by an individual firm, we build a model to derive that the variance in logarithmic markdown serves as sufficient statistics that can be used to infer the impact of heterogeneous monopsony power on overall production efficiency at the national level. We further quantify the welfare effect associated with labor reallocation after China joined the WTO in 2001. The empirical results suggest that lower input tariffs decrease the level of misallocation in the labor market, which is captured by the decreased variance in logarithmic markdown. In contrast, reductions in output tariffs have no significant effect. Overall, the improved allocation of labor accounts for 5% of the total production efficiency gains from China's trade liberalization.

Download or read book International Trade and Labor Markets written by Carl Davidson and published by W. E. Upjohn Institute. This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Trade Liberalization written by Romain Wacziarg and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling two-volume collection presents the major literary contributions to the economic analysis of the consequences of trade liberalization on growth, productivity, labor market outcomes and economic inequality. Examining the classical theories that stress gains from trade stemming from comparative advantage, the selection also comprises more recent theories of imperfect competition, where any potential gains from trade can stem from competitive effects or the international transmission of knowledge. Empirical contributions provide evidence regarding the explanatory power of these various theories, including work on the effects of trade openness on economic growth, wages, and income inequality, as well as evidence on the effects of trade on firm productivity, entry and exit. Prefaced by an original introduction from the editor, the collection will to be an invaluable research resource for academics, practitioners and those drawn to this fascinating topic.

Download or read book Monopsony in Motion written by Alan Manning and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens if an employer cuts wages by one cent? Much of labor economics is built on the assumption that all the workers will quit immediately. Here, Alan Manning mounts a systematic challenge to the standard model of perfect competition. Monopsony in Motion stands apart by analyzing labor markets from the real-world perspective that employers have significant market (or monopsony) power over their workers. Arguing that this power derives from frictions in the labor market that make it time-consuming and costly for workers to change jobs, Manning re-examines much of labor economics based on this alternative and equally plausible assumption. The book addresses the theoretical implications of monopsony and presents a wealth of empirical evidence. Our understanding of the distribution of wages, unemployment, and human capital can all be improved by recognizing that employers have some monopsony power over their workers. Also considered are policy issues including the minimum wage, equal pay legislation, and caps on working hours. In a monopsonistic labor market, concludes Manning, the "free" market can no longer be sustained as an ideal and labor economists need to be more open-minded in their evaluation of labor market policies. Monopsony in Motion will represent for some a new fundamental text in the advanced study of labor economics, and for others, an invaluable alternative perspective that henceforth must be taken into account in any serious consideration of the subject.

Download or read book Essays on Trade Liberalization and Labor Market Outcomes written by Zhe Jiang and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies trade liberalization and labor market outcomes. The first two chapters examine the impact of China's trade liberalization on the adjustment of U.S. labor market for skilled and unskilled workers in a dynamic general equilibrium framework with firm heterogeneity and factor proportions. In the first chapter, I most specifically look into the effect of trade cost reduction on U.S. skill premium in an environment which I abstract from labor market friction. Featuring labor market search and matching frictions, the second chapter is part of a broader agenda on the labor market effect of China's trade liberalization and U.S. firms' offshoring decisions, with a greater focus on the dynamics of unemployment of skilled and unskilled workers. The third chapter investigates the impact of the China's increased trade openness on its local labor market. It examines the effects of China's domestic migration policy change and trade liberalization on wage inequality in China using a dynamic general equilibrium model of international trade and internal migration across regions. This dissertation showcases some of the ways trade policy can interact with firms' endogenous offshoring and entry decisions, workers' mobility choices, and labor markets frictions in a dynamic fashion. More specifically, the first chapter studies how wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers interact with multinational firms' decisions and countries' different factor endowments using a two-country dynamic stochastic model featuring task-offshoring, heterogeneous firms and factor proportions. It shows that besides the traditional Stolper-Samuelson mechanism that shifts factors of production towards a country's comparative advantage sectors, there also exist other firm-level adjustment mechanisms that widen the wage gap after trade liberalization. It finds that in the short run, offshoring widens wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers through increasing high-skilled wage and lowering low-skilled wage. Such effect is more announced in the beginning phase of the adjustment, and slows down over time as low-skilled wage rises faster than the cool-down of high-skilled wage increase. The intensive margin and the extensive margin are both active in shaping rising wage gap in the home country, with the latter playing a more important role in the short to medium run compared to the beginning stage following the shock. The second chapter studies the dynamic effects of offshoring on the unemployment rates and wage inequality across the high-skilled and low-skilled workers through the dynamics of firms' production location and entry decisions in general equilibrium. First, I examine the dynamic effects of offshoring cost reduction due to China's trade liberalization. Estimates from vector autoregressions (VARs) show that a decrease in offshoring costs is associated with a short-lived increase in low-skilled unemployment, but a persistent decline in high-skilled unemployment and a less persistent expansion of wage gap in the source country. Second, I build a two-country trade-in-task model with firm heterogeneity, endogenous selection into entry and offshoring as well as search and matching frictions to study the channels through which offshoring cost reductions affect the labor market outcomes for different skill groups over time. The model successfully reproduces the VAR evidence and highlights the importance of endogenous firm entry and labor market frictions in generating the empirical dynamic responses of wage and unemployment across different skill groups. The third chapter investigates China's labor market's responses to its own trade liberalization, which is a relatively less explored topic compared to the relationship between the China shock and labor market changes in other countries. Using data from CHIP (Chinese Household Income Project), this chapter aims to fill this gap by estimating the effects of trade liberalization on Chinese local labor markets. In addition, it investigates changes in urban to rural wage inequality and skill premium in urban and rural areas separately with the availability of surveys conducted in urban and rural households. In the model, a dynamic general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous firms, heterogeneous workers and internal migration is employed to study the impact of policy-generated trade cost reduction and easing of migration restrictions on Chinese wage inequality. I focus on the role of labor mobility that characterizes the large rural-to-urban migration in the midst of trade liberalization in shaping skill premium and urban to rural wage inequality. Calibrating the changes in policy-generated migration cost reduction and trade cost decline, as well as productivity increase in the tradable sector, this paper analyzes the responses of different measures of wage inequality and other macroeconomics variables following these shocks. This dissertation highlights the role of interaction of firm dynamics, factor endowments and labor market frictions in shaping the labor market adjustments. The positive effects of offshoring on the labor market for workers regardless of skill levels suggest that more trade frictions designed to restrict offshoring is likely to hinder firm entry, which is a key driver that contributes to higher wages and lower unemployment rates of both skilled and unskilled workers over time. It also points to the importance of labor market reforms by showing that easing of migration restriction and search and matching frictions are both beneficial to exports and wages of all workers, with consequences of rising wage inequality though.

Download or read book Sticky Feet written by Claire H. Hollweg and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report quantifies labor mobility costs in developing countries and simulates the implied adjustment paths of employment and wages following a change in trade policy. High mobility costs are shown to reduce the potential gains to trade reform.

Download or read book Essays on the Effects of Public Policy written by Mayara Priscila Felix Silva and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation presents three papers on the effects of public policy on market outcomes. In the first paper, I analyze the effects of trade liberalization on firm labor market power in Brazil. I find that while Brazil's 1990s trade liberalization significantly lowered wages and increased labor market concentration, it did not increase firm labor market power. The negative effects of trade on local wages were therefore likely driven by reductions in the marginal revenue product of labor. In the second paper, in collaboration with M. Chatib Basri, Rema Hanna, and Benjamin A. Olken, I analyze the effects of two corporate taxation reforms in Indonesia: one in tax administration and one in tax rates. We find that the tax administration reform had large effects on tax revenue and reported income, and that the government would have had to raise the corporate income tax marginal tax rate on affected firms by 8 percentage points to match those revenue gains. Finally, the third paper evaluates the impact of a school discipline policy in Massachusetts on student suspensions and test scores at charter schools. I find that the policy reduced charter suspensions by roughly 10 percentage points, but had no impact on charter learning.

Download or read book The Labor Market and Economic Adjustment written by Pierre-Richard Agénor and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1995-11-01 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines the role of the labor market in the transmission process of adjustment policies in developing countries. It begins by reviewing the recent evidence regarding the functioning of these markets. It then studies the implications of wage inertia, nominal contracts, labor market segmentation, and impediments to labor mobility for stabilization policies. The effect of labor market reforms on economic flexibility and the channels through which labor market imperfections alter the effects of structural adjustment measures are discussed next. The last part of the paper identifies a variety of issues that may require further investigation, such as the link between changes in relative wages and the distributional effects of adjustment policies.

Download or read book Producer Dynamics written by Timothy Dunne and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Census Bureau has recently begun releasing official statistics that measure the movements of firms in and out of business and workers in and out of jobs. The economic analyses in Producer Dynamics exploit this newly available data on establishments, firms, and workers, to address issues in industrial organization, labor, growth, macroeconomics, and international trade. This innovative volume brings together a group of renowned economists to probe topics such as firm dynamics across countries; patterns of employment dynamics; firm dynamics in nonmanufacturing industries such as retail, health services, and agriculture; employer-employee turnover from matched worker/firm data sets; and turnover in international markets. Producer Dynamics will serve as an invaluable reference to economists and policy makers seeking to understand the links between firms and workers, and the sources of economic dynamics, in the age of globalization.

Download or read book Making It Big written by Andrea Ciani and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic and social progress requires a diverse ecosystem of firms that play complementary roles. Making It Big: Why Developing Countries Need More Large Firms constitutes one of the most up-to-date assessments of how large firms are created in low- and middle-income countries and their role in development. It argues that large firms advance a range of development objectives in ways that other firms do not: large firms are more likely to innovate, export, and offer training and are more likely to adopt international standards of quality, among other contributions. Their particularities are closely associated with productivity advantages and translate into improved outcomes not only for their owners but also for their workers and for smaller enterprises in their value chains. The challenge for economic development, however, is that production does not reach economic scale in low- and middle-income countries. Why are large firms scarcer in developing countries? Drawing on a rare set of data from public and private sources, as well as proprietary data from the International Finance Corporation and case studies, this book shows that large firms are often born large—or with the attributes of largeness. In other words, what is distinct about them is often in place from day one of their operations. To fill the “missing top†? of the firm-size distribution with additional large firms, governments should support the creation of such firms by opening markets to greater competition. In low-income countries, this objective can be achieved through simple policy reorientation, such as breaking oligopolies, removing unnecessary restrictions to international trade and investment, and establishing strong rules to prevent the abuse of market power. Governments should also strive to ensure that private actors have the skills, technology, intelligence, infrastructure, and finance they need to create large ventures. Additionally, they should actively work to spread the benefits from production at scale across the largest possible number of market participants. This book seeks to bring frontier thinking and evidence on the role and origins of large firms to a wide range of readers, including academics, development practitioners and policy makers.

Download or read book How Institutions Evolve written by Kathleen Thelen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-06 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The institutional arrangements governing skill formation are widely seen as a key element in the institutional constellations defining 'varieties of capitalism' across the developed democracies. This book explores the origins and evolution of such institutions in four countries - Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan. It traces cross-national differences in contemporary training regimes back to the nineteenth century, and specifically to the character of the political settlement achieved among employers in skill-intensive industries, artisans, and early trade unions. The book also tracks evolution and change in training institutions over a century of development, uncovering important continuities through putative 'break points' in history. Crucially, it also provides insights into modes of institutional change that are incremental but cumulatively transformative. The study underscores the limits of the most prominent approaches to institutional change, and identifies the political processes through which the form and functions of institutions can be radically reconfigured over time.

Download or read book Trade and Employment written by Marion Jansen and published by International Labor Office. This book was released on 2011 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An International Labor Office and European Commission publication Although the effect of trade on employment is a popular point of economic debate, there are very few factual assessments available. This book examines the most recent evidence and provides guidance for the design of tools to assess more accurately the employment impacts of trade. Trade and Employment argues for strengthening the micro-foundations of models used to evaluate the employment effects of trade and for including the informal economy and adjustment processes in modeling efforts. It emphasizes the role of governments in helping firms survive or grow, in providing social protection to protect against external shocks, in addressing gender equity, and in building physical infrastructure and human skills bases that facilitate export diversification. It is a valuable resource for all those interested in the debate on the employment effects of trade: workers and employers, academics and policymakers, and trade and labor specialists.

Download or read book Exports to Jobs written by Erhan Artuc and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Asia has grown rapidly with significant reductions in poverty, but it has not been able to match the fast-growing working age population, leading to lingering concerns about jobless growth and poor job quality. Could export growth in South Asia result in better labor market outcomes? The answer is yes, according to our study, which rigorously estimates—using a new methodology—the potential impact from higher South Asian exports per worker on wages and employment over a 10-year period. Our study shows the positive side of trade. It finds that increasing exports per worker would result in higher wages—mainly for better-off groups, like more educated workers, males, and more-experienced workers—although less-skilled workers would see the largest reduction in informality. How can the benefits be spread more widely? Our study suggests that scaling up exports in labor-intensive industries could significantly lower informality for groups like rural and less-educated workers in the region. Also, increasing skills, and participation of women and young workers in the labor force could make an even bigger dent in informal employment. The region could achieve these gains by: (i) boosting and connecting exports to people (e.g., removing trade barriers and investment in infrastructure); (ii) eliminating distortions in production (e.g., by more efficient allocation of inputs); and (iii) protecting workers (e.g., by investing in education and skills).

Download or read book World Economic Outlook April 2019 written by International Monetary Fund. Research Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After strong growth in 2017 and early 2018, global economic activity slowed notably in the second half of last year, reflecting a confluence of factors affecting major economies. China’s growth declined following a combination of needed regulatory tightening to rein in shadow banking and an increase in trade tensions with the United States. The euro area economy lost more momentum than expected as consumer and business confidence weakened and car production in Germany was disrupted by the introduction of new emission standards; investment dropped in Italy as sovereign spreads widened; and external demand, especially from emerging Asia, softened. Elsewhere, natural disasters hurt activity in Japan. Trade tensions increasingly took a toll on business confidence and, so, financial market sentiment worsened, with financial conditions tightening for vulnerable emerging markets in the spring of 2018 and then in advanced economies later in the year, weighing on global demand. Conditions have eased in 2019 as the US Federal Reserve signaled a more accommodative monetary policy stance and markets became more optimistic about a US–China trade deal, but they remain slightly more restrictive than in the fall.