Trade, wages, and profits

This paper formulates a structural empirical model of heterogeneous firms whose workers exhibit fair-wage preferences, leading to a link between a firm's operating profits and wages of workers employed by this firm. We estimate the parameters of the model in a dataset of five European economies. The model predicts an exporter wage premium, which we find to be sizable in all countries, with nearly 6% on average. The estimates enable us to conduct counterfactual exercises. We find that openness to international trade has quantitatively important effects, leading to higher wage inequality and lower aggregate employment.