Emmanuel Milet

The Performance of Trading Firms in the Services Sectors – Comparable Evidence from Four EU Countries

We analyse common stylized facts of services firms engaged in trade in a comparative study across four EU member countries. We find that, though relatively less engaged in trade than manufacturing firms, services firms have similar traits. Services firms are more likely to import than to export. Their prevalent type of trade is trade in goods. The complexity of trade activities is increasing in firm size and productivity. Two-way traders outperform one-way traders. Services are more likely to be traded by firms already engaged in trade of goods. Changes in trading status by either adding another dimension of trade (imports, exports) or another type of product (goods, services) are infrequent and are associated with significant pre-switching premia. In contrast, learning effects from switching trading status are uncommon. This evidence points to significant fixed cost of being engaged in trade. Thus, the literature on heterogeneous firms is able to explain the sorting of firms into trading and non-trading firms in the services sectors as well.

The Discriminatory Effect of Domestic Regulations on International Trade in Services: Evidence from Firm-Level Data

In order to promote international trade in services, the WTO-GATS aims at progressively eliminating discriminatory regulations, which apply to foreign suppliers, by guaranteeing equal national treatment. This paper looks instead at the trade effect of domestic regulations, which apply to all firms indifferently and do not intend to exclude foreign suppliers. We propose a theory-based empirical test to determine whether or not these domestic regulations affect foreign suppliers more than local ones. We take this test to the data by using French firm-level exports of professional services to OECD countries. Our econometric results show that domestic regulations in the importing markets matter significantly for trade in services. They reduce both the decision to export and the individual exports. These results tend to prove that domestic regulations are de facto discriminatory even if they are not de jure.

Labor adjustment costs across sectors and regions

This paper estimates the mobility costs of workers across sectors and regions in a large sample of developing countries. The paper develops a new methodology that uses cross-sectional data only. This is motivated by the fact that panel data typically are not available for most developing countries. The results suggest that, on average, sector mobility costs are higher than regional mobility costs. The costs of moving across sectors and regions are higher than the costs of moving across only sectors or only regions. In poorer countries, workers face higher mobility costs. The paper provides evidence suggesting that mobility costs, particularly across sectors, are partially driven by information assimetries and access to the Internet can mitigate these costs.

Online exports and the wage gap

The development of the Internet is often seen as a source of demand for skilled workers and therefore a potential driver of the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers. This paper focuses on the impact that international trade in online platforms has on the wage gap. Because online trade allows smaller firms with relatively more unskilled workers to access world markets it can be expected a priori that an expansion of online exports reduces the wage gap. After correcting for potential endogeneity bias in a sample of 22 developing countries for which online trade and wage gap data can be matched, the study finds that a 1 percent increase in the share of online exports over GDP leads to a 0.01 percent decline in the wage gap.