International competition and rent sharing in french manufacturing

The paper investigates the impact of import competition on rent-sharing between firms and employees. First, by applying recent advances in the estimation of price-costs margins to a large panel of French manufacturing firms for the period 1993–2007,we are able to classify each firm into labor- and product-market regimes based on the presence/absence of market power. Second, we concentrate on firms that operate in an efficient bargaining framework to study the effect of import penetration on workers' bargaining power. We find that French imports from other OECD countries have a negative effect on bargaining power, whereas the impact of imports from low wage countries is more muted. By providing firm-level evidence on the relationship between international trade and rent sharing, the paper sheds new light on the effect of trade liberalization on the labor market.