Essays in Economics on Liberalization and Reallocation

A central concern in economics is explaining the allocation of resources, its consequences for economic activity and the distribution of the associated economic revenues. This dissertation contains three essays examining the average and distributional effects of reallocations resulting from liberalization reforms or trade shocks. Chapter 1 examines the distributional effects of trade liberalization. A vast literature demonstrates that liberalization is associated with higher wage inequality. Nearly the entire literature considers comparative statics or steady states, which ignore dynamics and of necessity feature monotonic changes. I address these limitations by developing a micro-founded model that emphasizes the dynamics of reallocation between heterogeneous firms and workers in the presence of costly labor adjustments. Trade liberalization provides firms both new export markets and new sources of competition. Expanding high-paying firms increase wages to recruit better workers faster. Workers at firms threatened by competition accept wage cuts to delay their employers' exit and keep their job. This provides novel implications for both aggregate and within-firm inequality across