Highlights :

• Using linked employer-employee data from France, we show that exporters and non-exporters match with sets of workers that are different: exporters employ workers of higher type and lower type dispersion.
• The matching between exporting firms and workers is tighter in sectors characterized by better exporting opportunities.
• We rationalize this finding using a model of matching with search frictions where more productive firms and exporting firms match with better workers and tolerate a lower degree of dispersion among the workers employed.

 Abstract :
Does opening a market to international trade affect the pattern of matching between firms and workers? And does the modified sorting pattern affect welfare?  This paper answers these questions both theoretically and empirically in three parts. We set up a model of matching between heterogeneous workers and firms where variation in the worker type at the firm level exists in equilibrium only because of the presence of search costs. When firms gain access to the foreign market their revenue potential increases. When stakes are high, matching with the right worker becomes particularly important because deviations from the ideal match quickly reduce the value of the relationship. Hence exporting firms select sets of workers that are less dispersed relative to the average. We then document a novel fact about the hiring decisions of exporting firms versus non-exporting firms in a French matched employer-employee dataset. We construct the type of each worker using both a traditional wage regression and a model-based approach and construct measures of the average


 Keywords : Matching | Sorting | Exporting firms

 JEL : F14, F16, F60


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