IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_11675.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Trade Liberalization and Working Conditions

Author

Listed:
  • Bastien Alvarez
  • Gianluca Orefice
  • Farid Toubal

Abstract

This paper examines how trade liberalization-induced labor demand shocks affect wages and non-wage working conditions. Using exogenous trade shocks from EU enlargement and worker-level data, we find that export liberalization increases temporary contracts and atypical work schedules, particularly for production workers. However, it has no significant effect on wages, which may reflect firms’ ability to expand employment without raising pay due to labor supply elasticity and unemployment. Import liberalization weakly affects working conditions but, consistent with previous studies, lowers wages as firms face stronger competition and reduced labor demand.

Suggested Citation

  • Bastien Alvarez & Gianluca Orefice & Farid Toubal, 2025. "Trade Liberalization and Working Conditions," CESifo Working Paper Series 11675, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11675
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11675.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    keywords;

    JEL classification:

    • F15 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Economic Integration
    • F16 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade and Labor Market Interactions
    • J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General
    • J51 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Trade Unions: Objectives, Structure, and Effects
    • J81 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Standards - - - Working Conditions

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11675. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.