Search

This work investigates the role of input-trade liberalization on labor allocation between informal and formal employment in Mexico. Using individual household data for Mexico (1993-2001), we exploit exogenous input tariff changes applied to United States (U.S.) products when Mexico enters the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. The theoretical mechanisms considered are the foreign input cost reduction that increases revenues in the formal sector and the foreign input-skilled biased channel, such that input-trade liberalization induces the reallocation of workers from informal to formal firms. Our findings confirm these mechanisms: individuals working in manufacturing industries experiencing the average reduction in input tariffs (12 percentage points) are almost 4 percent more likely to work in formal rather than informal occupations. This effect is concentrated on high-skilled workers which reinforces the input-skilled biased complementarity channel.

Products must fulfill predetermined rules of origin to be exported under the preferential access granted by a free trade area member. In turn, rules of cumulation establish which countries' inputs qualify when computing the extent of origin of a product. Recent literature shows that restrictive rules of origin affect sourcing decision by reducing imports of intermediate goods from third countries relative to free trade area partners. This paper uses the introduction of the Pan-European Cumulation System in 1997 to explore the effects of rules of cumulation on trade in intermediate goods. The system provided the European Union Free Trade Area's peripheral partners (''spokes'') the possibility of cumulating stages of production from more countries to qualify for preferential access to the European Union market. Therefore, the system might have altered the organization of production in European Union centric value chains. The paper estimates a triple difference-in-differences specification and exploits different control groups. The results show that the effects of rules of cumulation on trade in intermediates are larger, with the stricter rules of origin applied to the related final good. When switching from bilateral to diagonal cumulation, the analysis finds a reduction in spokes' imports of intermediates from the rest of the world relative to those from spoke, reinforcing value chain connections within the cumulation zone. The analysis also finds a reduction in spokes' imports from the European Union 15 relative to the rest of the world and the Spokes. The findings suggest that the Pan-European Cumulation System allowed a reassessment of sourcing decisions: thanks to the possibility to cumulate, peripheral countries re-organized global value chain links.

Inequalities between workers of different skills have been growing in the era of globalization. Firms’ internationalization mode has an impact on job stability. Exporting firms are not only exposed to different foreign shocks, they also pay skill-intensive fixed costs to serve foreign markets. This implies that, for larger exporters, the labor demand for skilled workers is expected to be less volatile than for unskilled workers. In this paper we study the relationship between firms’ export activity and job stability across employment skills. Relying on detailed firm-level data from France for the period 1996-2007, we show that firms with higher export intensity exhibit a lower volatility of skilled labor demand relative to the volatility of unskilled labor demand. Our identification strategy is based on an instrumental variable approach to provide evidence on the causal effect of the export performance of the firm on the volatility of employment of different skills. Our findings suggest that exporting increases the stability of skilled jobs, but feeds the precariousness of unskilled ones.

We study how trade liberalization affects formal employment across gender. We propose a theoretical mechanism to explain how male and female formal employment shares can respond differently to trade liberalization through labor reallocation across tradable and non-tradable sectors. Using Mexican data over the period 1993-2001, we find that tariff cuts increase the probability of working formally for both men and women within 4-digit manufacturing industries. The formalization of jobs within tradable sectors is driven by large firms. Constructing a regional tariff measure, we find that regional exposure to trade liberalization increases the probability of working formally in the manufacturing sector for both men and women, and especially for men. However in the service sectors, the probability of working formally decreases for low-skilled women.

This paper examines how market-access strategies, via exports and FDI, respond to changes in the level of integration. Empirical evidence shows that both firm exports and multinational activity are affected by trade-liberalization episodes. We account for the strong positive correlation between exports and FDI by developing a general-equilibrium model featuring firm heterogeneity, trade and FDI with final and intermediate products. Different geographical spaces are considered to quantify the effect of a preferential trade agreement (PTA) on supply-mode decisions, for both partner and excluded countries. The model sheds new light on the mechanisms through which geography reshapes the concentration of economic activities both inside and outside the PTA area.

This paper is forthcoming in forthcoming in Beugelsdijk S., Brakman S., van Ees H. and Garretsen H. (eds.), chapter 7 in "Firms in the International Economy," MIT Press, Cambridge MA (USA), 2013.; Multinational and exporting firms play a key role in trade patterns. To highlight the importance of intra-firm trade in share of world trade, this paper develops a model of trade and intra-firm trade with heterogeneous firms. In this set up, trade costs apply to both exports and multinational production because both involve transportation. However, the magnitude will differ. The introduction of intra-firm trade generates a complementarity between FDI and Exports. Using data for 1999-2004, we test the gravity equations delivered by the model. Quantitatively, we find that exports within the boundaries of the firms are less sensitive to geographical barriers than arm's length trade.

Business services firms are increasingly under pressure from foreign competition. We develop an oligopolistic competition model that studies the effect of trade liberalization on exit and sectoral restructuring in the business services sector. We assume that firms are heterogeneous in their marginal costs, allowing the model to predict domestic M&A and exit by closedown, as well as foreign M&A. The model is brought to detailed French firm-level data on exit and M&A in the business services sector. The empirical analysis confirms that due to greater import penetration, French service firms exit by closedown and by M&A. Contrary to previous findings for manufacturing, we show that imports from high-income countries cause the majority of this exit, helping to inform the ongoing debate regarding the dangers of services trade liberalization.

This paper is a simple extension of the standard FDI model of Markusen and Horstmann (1992). This latter predicts firms would supply nearby markets with exports but far away markets with FDI. Nevertheless, this does not match the spatial pattern in the data for many home nations and industries. We propose a model with heterogeneous firms where the spatial pattern of FDI depends upon distance-linked communications costs as well as trade costs; the resulting model lines up both with the aggregate knowledge-capital model evidence and the firm-level evidence of Helpman-Melitz-Yeaple, while still allowing individual firms to engage in FDI in nearby markets while supplying distant markets via exports.