cover image: Schooled by trade? Retraining and import competition 24/50 - Working paper

Schooled by trade? Retraining and import competition 24/50 - Working paper

28 Oct 2024

Paralleling the large literature on the “China shock” in the US (Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2013), we henceforth refer to these developments as the “Eastern shock.” We begin by documenting the adverse labour market consequences of exposure to the Eastern shock and then explore the role of retraining as a margin of adjustment for workers. [...] In order to replicate these causal effects in the model, we set the ÂE in Theorem 2 equal to the shocks calibrated above and set Âis = 1 for all other countries and sectors.19 We then solve the equations in Theorem 2 to obtain counterfactual values for trade flows and the distributions of earnings, employment and retraining decisions across occupations and sectors in 2007. [...] Given β, the retraining elasticity γ then determines the sen- sitivity of the decision to retrain to labour market shocks and so is pinned down by the response of retraining rates to import exposure reported in the third row of Table 6. [...] The employment elas- ticity κ determines the substitutability of employment versus non-employment and so determines the scale of the employment responses reported in the first two rows of Table 6. [...] 6.2 Retraining and the Eastern Shock How did the option of retraining change the employment and welfare effects of the Eastern shock on Germany? We answer this question with the following experiment.

Authors

Lucas Conwell, John Finlay and Trevor C. Williams

Related Organizations

Pages
44
Published in
United Kingdom

Table of Contents