Labor provisions are integral to regional trade agreements (RTAs). Critics argue that they are a protectionist measure by reducing trade flows. Efforts to test that argument by employing various economic gravity models to trade agreements with labor provisions have failed to apply clear legal criteria and updated estimation methods. Drawing from the law of transnational contracts, we apply clear legal criteria to labor clauses and estimate a Poisson regression by pseudo maximum likelihood with high-dimensional fixed effects and controls for other “deep” agreement provisions associated with trade. We estimate the relationship between labor provisions and bilateral trade by classifying labor clauses found in all World Trade Organization-notified RTAs from the 1990s through February 2016. Contrary to previous efforts, our concise typology, updated estimation methods, and controls for additional trade-agreement variables find no robust evidence that labor provisions impact, much less reduce, trade flows (JEL F1, C5, F14, F66).

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贸易协定中的劳工条款：重塑保护主义辩论

劳工条款是区域贸易协定 (RTA) 的组成部分。批评者认为，它们是减少贸易流量的保护主义措施。通过采用各种经济引力模型对带有劳工条款的贸易协定来检验这一论点的努力未能应用明确的法律标准和更新的估计方法。借鉴跨国合同法，我们将明确的法律标准应用于劳动条款，并通过具有高维固定效应的伪最大似然估计泊松回归，并控制与贸易相关的其他“深度”协议条款。我们通过对 1990 年代至 2016 年 2 月期间所有世界贸易组织通知的区域贸易协定中的劳工条款进行分类，来估计劳工条款与双边贸易之间的关系。与之前的努力相反，我们的简洁类型学，