Exports and labor costs: Evidence from a French Policy

Clément Malgouyres and Thierry Mayer

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Abstract: We investigate the role that labor costs hold in exporters' performance. To do so, we exploit a large-scale French reform that granted most firms a tax credit proportional to the wagebill of their employees paid below a given threshold. This policy effectively translated into a cut in labor cost whose magnitude varies depending on firm-specific wage structures. We use the predicted treatment intensity based on pre-reform composition of the labor force as an instrument for the actual policy-induced firm-level change in labor costs. Although our point estimates are consistent with commonly estimated firm-level trade elasticities combined with reasonable labor shares in total costs, coefficients are found to be very noisy, suggesting lack of robust evidence of a causal effect of the policy. We discuss several potential explanations for our results as well as their implications.

Keywords: Labor costs; Firm-level exports; Competitiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-08
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03391928v1
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Published in Review of World Economics, 2018, 154 (3), pp.429 - 454. ⟨10.1007/s10290-018-0320-x⟩

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Journal Article: Exports and labor costs: evidence from a French policy (2018)
Working Paper: Exports and labor costs: Evidence from a French Policy (2018)
Working Paper: Exports and labor costs: Evidence from a French Policy (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:spmain:hal-03391928

DOI: 10.1007/s10290-018-0320-x

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