AGE AS A DETERMINANT OF LABOR'S TRADE POLICY INTERESTS

This paper shows that workers with identical innate abilities have heterogeneous trade policy interests, whereby age of the worker and industry of employment are most critical in explaining this heterogeneity. A modified specific factor model, with overlapping generations and a retraining requirement for job switchers, is developed to demonstrate how trade policies affect the economic interests of older workers far more than of younger workers, regardless of whether they gain or lose from the policy. Accordingly, older workers tend to have stronger incentives to become politically active than younger workers.