This paper infers the terms of trade effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) implemented in the 1990s. We estimate large FTA effects on bilateral trade volume in 2 digit manufacturing goods from 1990-2002, using panel data gravity methods to resolve two way causality. The terms of trade changes implied by these volume effects are deduced for 40 countries plus a rest-of-the-world aggregate using...

Recent papers show that imperfect property rights to a natural resource–a sector-specific factor– can be a source of comparative advantage. In these models, weaker property rights attract labor–the only mobile factor– to the resource sector, increasing the country’s comparative advantage for that sector. If capital in addition to labor is mobile, and if the benefits of capital are non-excludabl...

The paper sets up a two-country asymmetric trade model with heterogeneous firms, search frictions and endogenous labor market institutions. Countries are linked by trade in goods and non-cooperatively set unemployment benefits to maximize national welfare. We show that more open and smaller economies have more generous unemployment benefit replacement rates as a larger fraction of the costs is ...

Under plausible assumptions about preferences and technology, the model in this paper suggests that the entire volume of world trade matters for wage inequality. Therefore, trade integration, even among identical countries, is likely to increase the skill premium. Further, we argue that empirical evidence of a falling relative price of skill-intensive goods can be reconciled with the fast growt...

This paper investigates the effects of services offshoring on wages using individual level data combined with industry information on offshoring. Our results show that services offshoring affects the real wage of low and medium skilled individuals negatively. By contrast, skilled workers benefit from services offshoring in terms of higher real wages. Hence, offshoring has contributed to a widen...

Do Labour Market Institutions Matter? Micro-Level Wage Effects of International Outsourcing in Three European Countries This paper studies the impact of outsourcing on individual wages in three European countries with markedly different labour market institutions: Germany, the UK and Denmark. To do so we use individual level data sets for the three countries and construct comparable measures of...

In this paper we develop a model of a multi-sector multi-factor small open economy with involuntary unemployment due to fair wages. The model is used inter alia to analyse the labour market effects of changes in unemployment benefits and the domestic labour supply. Our analysis covers both the case where factor prices do not react to endowment changes – as in the Heckscher-Ohlin model – and the...