Heterogeneous workers and international trade

In this paper, I survey the recent theoretical literature that incorporates heterogeneous labor into models of international trade. The models with heterogeneous labor have been used to study how talent dispersion can be a source of comparative advantage, how the opening of trade affects the full distribution of wages, and how trade affects industry productivity and efficiency via its impact on sorting and matching in the labor market. Some of the most recent contributions also introduce labor market frictions to study the effects of trade on structural unemployment and on mismatch between workers and firms.