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International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs

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  • Maximiliano Dvorkin

Abstract

International trade has increased at a rapid pace in the last decades, altering production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. The estimated effects of trade on employment and welfare critically depend on data about workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. I show that the estimated employment and welfare effects of international trade, and the estimated structural parameters of standard models are biased when the analysis uses data subject to misclassification errors. I develop an econometric framework to estimate misclassification probabilities, corrected mobility matrices, and structural parameters, and show that the estimated employment and welfare effects of a trade shock are different from those estimated with uncorrected data, raising an important warning about conclusions drawn from data with coding errors.

Suggested Citation

  • Maximiliano Dvorkin, 2021. "International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs," Working Papers 2021-014, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, revised Dec 2023.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedlwp:93440
    DOI: 10.20955/wp.2021.014
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Andrés Rodríguez-Clare & Mauricio Ulate & José P. Vásquez, 2020. "Trade with Nominal Rigidities: Understanding the Unemployment and Welfare Effects of the China Shock," NBER Working Papers 27905, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    international trade; labor markets; classification errors; mobility; worker reallocation; structural estimation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F16 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade and Labor Market Interactions
    • F66 - International Economics - - Economic Impacts of Globalization - - - Labor
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion
    • C25 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Discrete Regression and Qualitative Choice Models; Discrete Regressors; Proportions; Probabilities

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