Essays in international trade and industrial organization[Essais en commerce international et organisation Industrielle]

This dissertation is a collection of three essays in the fields of international trade and industrial organization. The first two chapters study the macroeconomic implications of firm heterogeneity. In the first chapter, I use data on the universe of French manufacturing exporters from 1994-2001 to study the relationship between international trade and the manufacturing labor share. In particular, I investigate how and to what extent changes in demand conditions on foreign markets impact the labor share. This chapter aims to shed light on whether international trade may affect the labor share through channels other than changes in import exposure. In the second chapter, which is joint work with Flavien Moreau, we study the cost of distortions to competition on aggregate productivity. To do so, we have assembled a database on the identity of colluding firms that have been fined by the French competition regulator. We document novel stylized facts on cartels and anticompetitive firms. We use a static macroeconomic model to study the economic cost of cartels and help answer the following questions: is it large? If so, why does it differ from what Arnold Harberger obtained in his 1954 paper? Finally, the last chapter co-authored with Florin Cucu studies the link between asylum policies and foreign policy concerns using panel data on asylum applications in the European Union from 1999 to 2017. We then study what this relationship implies for international trade flows in a gravity regression framework.