Trade liberalization, labor market power, and misallocation across firms: Evidence from China's WTO accession

A-Tier
Journal: Journal of Development Economics
Year: 2024
Volume: 171
Issue: C

Authors (3)

Xie, Enze (not in RePEc) Xu, Mingzhi (Peking University) Yu, Miaojie (not in RePEc)

Score contribution per author:

1.341 = (α=2.01 / 3 authors) × 2.0x A-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization on the heterogeneity of labor market power among manufacturing firms, which is a potential source of misallocation. The model shows that heterogeneity of labor market power distorts the allocation of the factors of production, and the variance in the natural log of the markdown serves as a sufficient statistic to infer its negative impact on overall production efficiency. Using China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a natural experiment, the empirical results suggest that lower input tariffs decrease the variance in the natural log of the markdown, which reflects the improvement in misallocation. In contrast, reductions in output tariffs have no significant effects.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:eee:deveco:v:171:y:2024:i:c:s0304387824001020
Journal Field
Development
Author Count
3
Added to Database
2026-01-29