Unemployment and interactions between trade and labour market institutions

Herve Boulhol

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: There is ample evidence that a country's labour market institutions are important determinants of unemployment. This study generalises Davis' (1998) idea according to which the institutions of the trade partners matter also for a country's equilibrium unemployment rate as they generate comparative advantages. Moreover, the empirical investigation provides some evidence that the interactions between bilateral trade and relative labour market regulations affect the equilibrium unemployment rate. Given data limitations in this area, the ambition of this paper is merely to draw the attention to the general relevance of these interactions as complementing factors to other explanations of unemployment. Another interesting finding is that a fairly low regulated country like Canada can be negatively affected because its main trading partner is even less regulated, while a high regulated country like Germany appears rather sheltered because its trading partners are also highly regulated

Keywords: Unemployment; trade; labour market institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F16 F41 J50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2008-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-lab and nep-opm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2008/Bla08016.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Unemployment and interactions between trade and labour market institutions (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mse:cesdoc:bla08016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Label ().