International competitiveness, job creation and job destruction—An establishment-level study of German job flows

Trade openness, real exchange rates and job reallocation: evidence from Belgium

“…This result is robust to using different measures of job flows, and is stable across a number of different estimations. Such evidence of a job destruction-driven adjustment is in line with earlier findings by Klein et al (2003a) for the US, and differs from what has been found for other European countries, in particular France (Gourinchas 1999) and Germany (Moser et al 2010), where the adjustment to RER shocks was mainly driven by the job creation margin. Moser et al (2010) attributed the difference between the US and Germany to the far-stricter employment protection legislation in Germany, which makes firing costly and thus prevents smooth adjustments to shocks through job destruction.…”

“…As previously mentioned, this paper builds upon previous work by Gourinchas (1988Gourinchas ( , 1999, Klein et al (2003a) and Moser et al (2010). More generally, it is related to the growing body of literature on the connections between international trade and the labor market, as reviewed by Klein et al (2003b) and Crino' (2009).…”

“…19 Recently, Moser et al (2010) have employed an alternative measure of RER, which is based on the cross-country comparison of the average hourly wages, all denominated in the same currency. The main advantage of such an approach is that of focusing explicitly on labor costs, which are likely to be most relevant when studying firms' employment decisions.…”

“…For instance, different firms may display diversified reactions to international trade shocks, depending upon heterogeneous productivity levels (Melitz 2003;Bernard et al 2003), capital intensity and product-mix (Bernard et al 2006;Khandelwal 2010). Moreover, firms within the same industry are likely to face heterogeneous levels of trade exposure, as documented, among others, by Bernard et al (2007a), Mayer and Ottaviano (2007) and Moser et al (2010).…”

“…Until now, only a few papers have studied the relation between real effective exchange rates and job flows: Gourinchas (1998Gourinchas ( , 1999 on the US and France, respectively, Klein et al (2003a) on the US, and Moser et al (2010) on Germany. All these studies have found that real appreciations have a negative impact on net employment growth, and that this impact is magnified by increasing levels of trade exposure, at the firm and industry level.…”