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A recent literature has documented the labor market effects of trade shocks by investigating the relationship between regions' labor market outcomes and their exposure to aggregate trade flows as predicted by their sectoral specialization. The large estimated effect has contributed to change the conventional view that trade had only benign effect on the labor markets of advanced economies. While technology was thought to be the key factor driving sectoral employment shares and wage structure over the 1990s, trade, in particular with China and Eastern-European countries seem to have mattered most over the 2000s. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which these national industry trade shocks were facilitated by concomitant technical progress, that is we test for the presence of “technology-induced” trade. To do so, we focus on broadband technology in France and use the staggered roll-out of this information technology to estimate its impact on the importing behavior of affected firms. Using a simple event-study design, we find that broadband expansion leads to an increase in the value of imported goods. We also document change in importing activities along several margins (number of origin countries, of products). Simple counterfactual suggests that absent broadband expansion, the growth in import penetration would have been between 20 and 25% lower over the 2001-2007 period. We finally provide evidence that increase in inputs availability increased productivity in the manufacturing sector, thus show that it is a mechanism for the productivity enhancing effects of broadband internet.
