abstract

Tracking individual workers across jobs after Brazil's trade liberalization in the 1990s shows that tariff cuts trigger worker displacements, but neither exporters nor comparative-advantage sectors absorb trade-displaced labor. On the contrary, exporters separate from significantly more and hire fewer workers than the average employer. Trade liberalization increases transitions to services, unemployment, and out of the labor force. Results are consistent with faster labor productivity growth than sales expansions so that output shifts to more productive firms while labor does not. Higher rates of failed reallocations and longer durations of complete reallocations result, associated with a costly incidence of idle resources.

keywords: International trade; factor reallocation; labor demand and turnover; linked employer-employee data; Brazil

jel: F14, F16, J23, J63

background

• formal employment census RAIS (in portuguese)
• supporting files
  • empirical supplement with additional tables and graphs [pdf 966k]
  • occupational concordances [pdf 232k]
  • metropolitan household sample data PME [zip 611k]
  • manufacturing firm survey information (PIA) [summary] [pdf 490k]
  • data and resources for research on brazil
• replication
  • sas 9.1 code for random worker draws (on RAIS) [zip 14k]
  • stata 9.1 code for complete replication (on RAIS and PME) [zip 449k]
  • stata 9.1 code for selective replication (on PME only, link above) [zip 2k]
  • stata 8.2 code for workforce changeover statistics (on RAIS) [zip 185k]
• employer-employee wage estimates: "the structure of worker compensation in Brazil, with a comparison to France and the United States" [doi pdf]
• employer-level estimates: "trade and workforce changeover in Brazil" [pdf 311k]
• descriptive evidence: "trade reform, employment allocation and worker flows" [pdf 346k]
• cesifo working paper [1936] version