We study the response of regional employment and nominal wages to trade liberalization, exploiting the natural experiment provided by the opening of Central and Eastern European markets after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. Using data for Austrian municipalities, we examine differential pre- and post-1990 wage and employment growth rates between regions bordering the formerly communist economies and interior regions. If the 'border regions' are defined narrowly, within a band of less than 50 kilometers, we can identify statistically significant liberalization effects on both employment and wages. While wages responded earlier than employment, the employment effect over the entire adjustment period is estimated to be around three times as large as the wage effect. The implied slope of the regional labor supply curve can be replicated in an economic geography model that features obstacles to labor migration due to immobile housing and to heterogeneous locational preferences.

This paper focuses on developing countries that export for the first time to the OECD and obtains several important results on export dynamic, linking exports experience and exports survival. Using product level data at the SITC 5 digit level for 114 developing countries on the 1962-2009 period, we show that prior exports experience obtained in non-OCDE markets increases survival in the OECD market. The effect of experience depreciates however rapidly with time: gaining experience for more than two years is worthless. Moreover, a break in export experience prior to entering the OECD reduces the benefit on survival. Geographic export dynamic reveals that experience is acquired in neighbor, easy to access markets before reaching more distant, richer partners and ultimately serving the OECD. Where the experience is acquired does not however matter for survival.

We develop a multi-country, multi-sector trade model with labor market frictions and structural equilibrium unemployment. Trade opening leads to a reduction in unemployment if it raises real wages and reallocates labor towards sectors with lower-than-average labor market frictions. We estimate sector-specific labor market frictions from 25 OECD countries and the trade parameters of the model using worldwide trade data. We then quantify the potential unemployment and real wage effects of implementing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) or the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and of eliminating trade imbalances worldwide. The unemployment and real wage effects sometimes work in opposite directions for some countries, such as the US under TTIP. We introduce a welfare criterion that accounts for both effects and splits such ties. Accordingly, US welfare is predicted to decrease under TTIP.