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International Welfare and Employment Linkages Arising from Minimum Wages

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  • Hartmut Egger
  • Peter Egger
  • James R. Markusen

Abstract

We formulate a two-country model with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms to reconsider labor market linkages in open economies. Labor-market imperfections arise by virtue of country-specific real minimum wages. Two principal experiments are considered. First, we show that trade liberalization under minimum wages differs significantly from trade liberalization under standard assumptions. In the former case, there is effectively a perfectly elastic supply of labor to production whereas in the conventional case it is assumed that aggregate labor supply is perfectly inelastic. Standard effects on marginal and average firm productivity are reversed in our model, yet there are significant gains from trade arising from employment expansion, an effect quite different from the source of gains from trade in the conventional approach. Second, we show that with firm heterogeneity an increase in one country's minimum wage triggers firm exit in both countries and thus harms workers at home and abroad. In an extension to our baseline model, we illustrate that offshoring production from the high-wage to the low-wage country within multinational firms lowers the scope for exporting the costs of a higher minimum wage to the trading partner.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 15196.

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Date of creation: Jul 2009
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15196

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  1. M. Del Gatto & G. Mion & GIP. Ottaviano, 2007. "Trade Integration, Firm Selection and the Costs of Non-Europe," Working Paper CRENoS 200703, Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia.
  2. Bernard, Andrew B. & Bradford Jensen, J., 1999. "Exceptional exporter performance: cause, effect, or both?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(1), pages 1-25, February.
  3. Markusen, James R., 2002. "Multinational Firms and the Theory of International Trade," MPRA Paper 8380, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  4. Kreickemeier, Udo & Nelson, Douglas, 2006. "Fair wages, unemployment and technological change in a global economy," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(2), pages 451-469, December.
  5. Melitz, Marc J, 2002. "The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity," CEPR Discussion Papers 3381, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  6. Kjell Erik Lommerud & Frode Meland & Lars Sørgard, 2002. "Unionized Oligopoly, Trade Liberalization and Location Choice," CESifo Working Paper Series 777, CESifo Group Munich.
  7. Donald R. Davis & James Harrigan, 2007. "Good jobs, bad jobs, and trade liberalization," Discussion Papers 0607-07, Columbia University, Department of Economics.
  8. Do, Quy-Toan & Levchenko, Andrei A., 2006. "Trade, inequality, and the political economy of institutions," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3836, The World Bank.
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  10. Hartmut Egger & Udo Kreickemeier, 2009. "Firm Heterogeneity And The Labor Market Effects Of Trade Liberalization," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 50(1), pages 187-216, 02.
  11. Davis, Donald R, 1998. "Does European Unemployment Prop Up American Wages? National Labor Markets and Global Trade," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(3), pages 478-94, June.
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  14. Elhanan Helpman & Oleg Itskhoki & Stephen Redding, 2008. "Inequality and Unemployment in a Global Economy," NBER Working Papers 14478, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  15. Stephen Nickell, 1997. "Unemployment and Labor Market Rigidities: Europe versus North America," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 11(3), pages 55-74, Summer.
  16. Richard Baldwin, 2005. "Heterogeneous Firms and Trade: Testable and Untestable Properties of the Melitz Model," NBER Working Papers 11471, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  17. Helpman, Elhanan, 1984. "A Simple Theory of International Trade with Multinational Corporations," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 92(3), pages 451-71, June.
  18. Markusen, James R, 1989. "Trade in Producer Services and in Other Specialized Intermediate Inputs," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(1), pages 85-95, March.
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  20. Ethier, Wilfred J, 1982. "National and International Returns to Scale in the Modern Theory of International Trade," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 72(3), pages 389-405, June.
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Cited by:
  1. Lommerud, Kjell Erik & Meland, Frode & Straume, Odd Rune, 2011. "North-South technology transfer in unionised multinationals," CEPR Discussion Papers 8664, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  2. Egger, Hartmut & Etzel, Daniel, 2012. "The impact of trade on employment, welfare, and income distribution in unionized general oligopolistic equilibrium," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(6), pages 1119-1135.
  3. Hartmut, Egger & Meland, Frode, 2011. "Product and Labor Market Deregulation in Unionized Oligopoly with Asymmetric Countries," Working Papers in Economics 11/11, University of Bergen, Department of Economics.
  4. Gabriel Felbermayr & Mario Larch & Lechthaler Wolfgang, 2011. "Endogenous Labor Market Insitutions in an Open Economy," Ifo Working Paper Series Ifo Working Paper No. 108, Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
  5. Ma, Shuang & Sun, Churen & Tian, Guoqiang, 2011. "Minimum wage and export: evidence from Chinese firm-level data," MPRA Paper 35098, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  6. Gabriel Felbermayr & Eckhard Janeba & Holger Görg & Ansgar Belke & Michael Pflüger & Stefan Ebner, 2010. "Schadet Deutschlands Exportpolitik den Nachbarn?," Ifo Schnelldienst, Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 63(15), pages 03-24, 08.

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