Globalization and labour-market adjustment: how fast and at what cost?
研究劳动力市场灵活性如何影响贸易自由化的收益和短期调整成本，发现劳动力市场僵化的经济体从自由化中获益最少，因为巨大收益几乎被高额调整成本抵消。
In this paper we argue that the flexibility of an economy's labour market plays a role in determining the gains from trade liberalization, the level of short-run adjustment costs, and the relative value of these two measures. To do so, we describe the model introduced in Davidson and Matusz (2000) which allows us to solve for adjustment costs when workers vary according to ability and jobs differ in terms of the skills that they require. We then report results based on simulations of this model. We find that economies with sluggish labour markets have the least to gain from liberalization. The reason is that while the removal of trade barriers creates large benefits, they are almost completely offset by large short-run adjustment costs. In contrast, we find that with either very flexible or very slothful labour market gains from liberalization are always significantly larger than the short-run adjustment costs.