A growing body of research examines the regional effects of trade liberalization using a weighted average of trade policy changes across industries. This paper develops a specific-factors model of regional economies that provides a theoretical foundation for this intuitively appealing empirical approach and also provides guidance on treatment of the nontraded sector. In the context of Brazil's early 1990s trade liberalization, I find that regions facing a 10 percentage point larger liberalization-induced price decline experienced a 4 percentage point larger wage decline. The results also confirm the empirical relevance of appropriately dealing with the nontraded sector. (JEL F13, F16, O19, O24)

We study the evolution of trade liberalization's effects on Brazilian local labor markets. Regions facing larger tariff cuts experienced prolonged declines in formal sector employment and earnings relative to other regions. The impact of tariff changes on regional earnings 20 years after liberalization was three times the effect after 10 years. These increasing effects on regional earnings are inconsistent with conventional spatial equilibrium models, which predict declining effects due to spatial arbitrage. We investigate potential mechanisms, finding empirical support for a mechanism involving imperfect interregional labor mobility and dynamics in labor demand, driven by slow capital adjustment and agglomeration economies. This mechanism gradually amplifies the effects of liberalization, explaining the slow adjustment path of regional earnings and quantitatively accounting for the magnitude of the long-run effects. (JEL F16, J23, J31, J61, O15, O19, R23)

This paper demonstrates that low-skilled Mexican-born immigrants’ location choices in the U.S. respond strongly to changes in local labor demand, and that this geographic elasticity helps equalize spatial differences in labor market outcomes for low-skilled native workers, who are much less responsive. We leverage the substantial geographic variation in employment losses that occurred during Great Recession, and our results confirm the standard finding that high-skilled populations are quite geographically responsive to employment opportunities while low-skilled populations are much less so. However, low-skilled immigrants, especially those from Mexico, respond even more strongly than high-skilled native-born workers. Moreover, we show that natives living in metro areas with a substantial Mexican-born population are insulated from the effects of local labor demand shocks compared to those in places with few Mexicans. The reallocation of the Mexican-born workforce reduced the incidence of local demand shocks on low-skilled natives’ employment outcomes by more than 50 percent.

Verhoogen, and participants at various conferences and seminars for helpful comments. Dix-Carneiro thanks Daniel Lederman and the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank for warmly hosting him while part of the paper was written. Remaining errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Trade economists have long studied the effects of globalization on wage differences between workers with different levels of skill or education.1 This literature has generally sought to link globalization to changes in the economy-wide skill premium. Attanasio et al. (2004) and Gonzaga et al. (2006) are salient examples that investigate whether changes in sector-specific prices or tariffs, changes in skill composition within and across sectors, and movements in the skill premium are consistent with the predictions of workhorse trade models, such as the Heckscher-Ohlin model. However, there is little evidence directly establishing a causal effect of globalization on the skill premium.2 More recently, a growing body of research has focused on trade's differential effects across local markets within a country.3 In this paper, we combine these two strands of literature by developing a theoretically consistent approach to studying the causal effect of trade liberalization on the skill premium at the local level.We develop a specific-factors model of regional economies that includes two types of workers, skilled and unskilled, who are com- *

We empirically study the dynamics of labor market adjustment following the Brazilian trade reform of the 1990s. We use variation in industry-specific tariff cuts interacted with initial regional industry mix to measure trade-induced local labor demand shocks, and then examine regional and individual labor market responses to those one-time shocks over two decades. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we do not find that the impact of local shocks is dissipated over time through wage-equalizing migration. Instead, we find steadily growing effects of local shocks on regional formal sector wages and employment for 20 years. This finding can be rationalized in a simple equilibrium model with two complementary factors of production, labor and industry-specific factors such as capital, that adjust slowly and imperfectly to shocks. Next, we document rich margins of adjustment induced by the trade reform at the regional and individual level. Workers initially employed in harder hit regions face continuously deteriorating formal labor market outcomes relative to workers employed in less affected regions, and this gap persists even 20 years after the beginning of trade liberalization. Negative local trade shocks induce workers to shift out of the formal tradable sector and into the formal nontradable sector. Non-employment strongly increases in harder-hit regions in the medium run, but in the longer run, non-employed workers eventually find re-employment in the informal sector. Working age population does not react to these local shocks, but formal sector net migration does, consistent with the relative decline of the formal sector and growth of the informal sector in adversely affected regions.

We study the evolution of trade liberalization's effects on local labor markets, following Brazil's early 1990s trade liberalization. Regions that initially specialized in industries facing larger tariff cuts experienced prolonged declines in formal sector employment and earnings relative to other regions. The impact of tariff changes on regional earnings 20 years after liberalization was three times the size of the effect 10 years after liberalization. These findings are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and to controlling for a wide array of postliberalization shocks. The pattern of increasing effects on regional earnings is not consistent with conventional spatial equilibrium models, which predict that effect magnitudes decline over time due to spatial arbitrage. We investigate potential mechanisms, finding empirical support for a mechanism involving imperfect interregional labor mobility and dynamics in labor demand, driven by slow capital adjustment and agglomeration economies. This mechanism gradually amplifies the initial labor demand shock resulting from liberalization. We show that the mechanism explains the slow adjustment path of regional earnings and quantitatively accounts for the magnitude of the long-run effects.

Trade economists have long studied the effects of globalization on wage differences between workers with different levels of skill or education.1 This literature has generally sought to link globalization to changes in the economy-wide skill premium. Attanasio et al. (2004) and Gonzaga et al. (2006) are salient examples that investigate whether changes in sector-specific prices or tariffs, changes in skill composition within and across sectors, and movements in the skill premium are consistent with the predictions of workhorse trade models, such as the Heckscher-Ohlin model. However, there is little evidence directly establishing a causal effect of globalization on the skill premium.2 More recently, a growing body of research has focused on trade's differential effects across local markets within a country.3 In this paper, we combine these two strands of literature by developing a theoretically consistent approach to studying the causal effect of trade liberalization on the skill premium at the local level.We develop a specific-factors model of regional economies that includes two types of workers, skilled and unskilled, who are com- *