The economic effects from labor market integration are crucially affected by the extent to which countries are open to trade. In this paper we build a multi-country dynamic general equi-librium model with trade in goods and labor mobility across countries to study and quantify the economic effects of trade and labor market integration. In our model trade is costly and features households of different skills and nationalities facing costly forward-looking relocation decisions. We use the EU Labour Force Survey to construct migration flows by skill and na-tionality across 17 countries for the period 2002-2007. We then exploit the timing variation of the 2004 EU enlargement to estimate the elasticity of migration flows to labor mobility costs, and to identify the change in labor mobility costs associated to the actual change in policy. We apply our model and use these estimates, as well as the observed changes in tariffs, to quantify the effects from the EU enlargement. We find that new member state countries are the largest winners from the EU enlargement, and in particular unskilled labor. We find smaller welfare gains for EU-15 countries. However, in the absence of changes to trade policy, the EU-15 would have been worse off after the enlargement. We study even further the interaction effects between trade and migration policies and the role of different mechanisms in shaping our results. Our results highlight the importance of trade for the quantification of the welfare and migration effects from labor market integration.

The economic effects of a pandemic crucially depend on the extent to which countries are connected in global production networks. In this paper we incorporate production barriers induced by COVID-19 shock into a Ricardian model with sectoral linkages, trade in intermediate goods and sectoral heterogeneity in production. We use the model to quantify the welfare effect of the disruption in production that started in China and quickly spread across the world. We find that the COVID-19 shock has a considerable impact on most economies in the world, especially when a share of the labor force is quarantined. Moreover, we show that global production linkages have a clear role in magnifying the effect of the production shock. Finally, we show that the economic effects of the COVID-19 shock are heterogeneous across sectors, regions and countries, depending on the geographic distribution of industries in each region and country and their degree of integration in the global production network.

Better managers and managerial practices lead to better firm performance. Yet, little is known about what happens when managers move across firms. Does a firm hiring a good manager improve its performance? If yes is there some valuable knowledge the manager has acquired and successfully diffused to the new firm? In order to answer these questions, we use information related to specific activities the manager was involved in when working for previous firms. More specifically, we use information on whether the manager has worked in the past for firms exporting to a specific destination country or a specific product. Our data is rich enough to allow controlling for both manager and firm unobservables and wash out any time-invariant ability of the manager as well as overall firm performance. We find that the export experience gained by managers in previous firms leads their current firm towards higher export performance, and commands a sizable wage premium for the manager. We use several strategies to deal with endogeneity including an exogenous event study: the sudden end of the Angolan civil war in 2002. We further refine our analysis by looking at different types of managers (general, production, financial and sales) and show how specific export experience interacts with the degree of product differentiation and/or the financial vulnerability of a firm's products as well as with rising import competition from China.

The economic effects from labor market integration are crucially affected by the extent to which countries are open to trade. In this paper we build a multi-country dynamic general equi-librium model with trade in goods and labor mobility across countries to study and quantify the economic effects of trade and labor market integration. In our model trade is costly and features households of different skills and nationalities facing costly forward-looking relocation decisions. We use the EU Labour Force Survey to construct migration flows by skill and na-tionality across 17 countries for the period 2002-2007. We then exploit the timing variation of the 2004 EU enlargement to estimate the elasticity of migration flows to labor mobility costs, and to identify the change in labor mobility costs associated to the actual change in policy. We apply our model and use these estimates, as well as the observed changes in tariffs, to quantify the effects from the EU enlargement. We find that new member state countries are the largest winners from the EU enlargement, and in particular unskilled labor. We find smaller welfare gains for EU-15 countries. However, in the absence of changes to trade policy, the EU-15 would have been worse off after the enlargement. We study even further the interaction effects between trade and migration policies and the role of different mechanisms in shaping our results. Our results highlight the importance of trade for the quantification of the welfare and migration effects from labor market integration.

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