Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments May 6, 2011 erstellt
Description:
Whenever a country specializes on industries that use female labor intensively, its female labor force participation should increase. This intuition, which bases on the Stolper-Samuleson Theorem, may fail in a three-factor, two-good model. We develop a model where capital, male and female work are distinct factors of production. We follow an established assumption and postulate that capital accumulation closes the gender wage gap. In this setup, the Stolper-Samuleson based intuition fails necessarily: female labor shares drop in countries that specialize on sectors intensive in female labor, and vice versa. In an empirical part, we use a period of trade liberalization between the U.S. and Mexico to assess the impact of trade on female labor shares at the U.S. state level. To establish causality, bilateral trade between U.S. states and Mexico are instrumented by distance. The tests confirm our theory: exposure to trade with Mexico has increased the gender wage gap and decreased female labor shares in the U.S