دانلود رایگان مقاله تجارت و پویایی بازار کار

abstract

Recent studies in international trade highlight potential labor market effects of trade liberalization through firm selection. Our empirical study contributes to this recent strand of literature by studying the short- and long-run effects of trade on unemployment in Germany. We employ a structural VAR approach in order to disentangle the total effect of trade on unemployment into job-findings and separations. Our results indicate that the unemployment effect mainly works through a drop in the job-separation rate, which can be explained by job-to-job transitions from contracting towards expanding firms. Thus, our results reinforce the importance of endogenous separations and on-the-job search in models of trade, heterogeneous firms and labor market frictions.

4. Conclusion

Our analysis of the impulse–response relationship between trade liberalization and labor market dynamics yields interesting insights. Besides the decline of unemployment, we do not find an impact effect on the job-finding rate. The short-run adjustment of unemployment predominantly works through lower jobseparations. Put differently, although we find positive long-run effects on unemployment in line with most of the existing empirical studies on trade and unemployment, the adjustment mechanism seems to work through different channels as discussed in the established literature. Endogenous separations and job-tojob transitions are ingredients that could bring theory much closer to the empirical findings; more productive firms have an incentive to keep workers with ability below the initial ability-threshold and workers at shrinking firms would move directly to expanding firms.