All you need is love? Trade shocks, inequality, and risk sharing between partners

Katrin Huber and Erwin Winkler

European Economic Review, 2019, vol. 111, issue C, 305-335

Abstract: A large literature suggests that growing international trade is among the drivers of rising labor earnings inequality within countries. We contribute to this literature by studying the distributional effects of Germany’s trade integration with China and Eastern Europe. We provide evidence that the trade shock explains 5–18% of the rise in earnings inequality between individual workers. However, when we take risk sharing between partners into account, we find that the inequality-increasing effect of the trade shock is up to 42% lower. Our results therefore suggest that a pure worker-level perspective which ignores risk sharing might give an incomplete picture of the distributional effects of international trade.

Keywords: International trade; Earnings inequality; Risk sharing; Households (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 F14 F16 J12 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:111:y:2019:i:c:p:305-335

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2018.10.003

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