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We study the impact of regional and sectoral productivity changes on the U.S. economy. To that end, we consider an environment that captures the effects of interregional and intersectoral trade in propagating disaggregated productivity changes at the level of a sector in a given U.S. state to the rest of the economy. The quantitative model we develop features pairwise interregional trade across all 50 U.S. states, 26 traded and non-traded industries, labor as a mobile factor, and structures and land as an immobile factor. We allow for sectoral linkages in the form of an intermediate input structure that matches the U.S. input-output matrix. Using data on trade flows by industry between states, as well as other regional and industry data, we obtain the aggregate, regional and sectoral elasticities of measured TFP, GDP, and employment to regional and sectoral productivity changes. We find that such elasticities can vary significantly depending on the sectors and regions affected and are importantly determined by the spatial structure of the US economy. We highlight the role of these elasticities by tracing out the effects of productivity gains in California in the Computers and Electronics industry between 2002 and 2007 on all other U.S. sectors and regions.

I build and estimate a dynamic structural model of sectoral choices with heterogeneous workers accumulating imperfectly transferable human capital. Utility costs provide an additional barrier to mobility. Estimated by Simulated Minimum Distance on administrative data covering the population of Danish workers, costs are found to be in the range of 10% to 19% of average annual wages. Removing permanent unobserved heterogeneity increases the utility costs by an order of magnitude. I show that both the imperfect transferability of human capital and the utility costs are important in explaining the slow adjustment of the labour market following shocks to the economy. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

We analyze changes in the skill content of occupations in US four-digit manufacturing industries between 1999 and 2010. Following a >task-based> approach, we elaborate a measure of non-routine skill intensity that captures the effects of industry exposure to both technology and international trade. The article adds to previous literature by focusing on both the determinants of demand for non-routine skills and their effects on industry productivity and wages. The key finding is that import competition from low-wage countries has been a strong driver of demand for non-routine skills during the 2000s. Both technology and trade with low-wage countries are associated with mild cross-industry convergence in skill intensity, while trade with high- and medium-wage countries are at the root of persistent heterogeneity across occupational groups. We also find that higher non-routine skill intensity has had, at best, a modest effect on productivity and wages, except in high-skill occupations., D.C. acknowledges the financial support of the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (RYC-2011-07888).

The aim of this article is to analyse the consequences of some structural reforms on the institutional coherence of OECD countries, particularly Continental Europe, and on their economic performance, particularly employment. Because institutions in developed political economies are interrelated through a complex network of complementarities, institutional change has consequences beyond the area concerned by a reform. This also implies that there are complementarity effects in reforms themselves. A challenge of reform programs is therefore to achieve a new type of complementarities between reformed institutions. The paper presents empirical evidence questioning the compatibility of the ongoing structural reforms in product and labour markets with the existing institutional structures in some OECD countries. The coherence of the flexicurity strategy, i.e. a combination of labour market flexibility and generous welfare state, is also questioned, both from economic efficiency and political economy points of view., Cet article se propose d'analyser les conséquences que certaines réformes structurelles sur la cohérence institutionnelle de pays de l'OCDE, notamment d'Europe continentale et sur leur performance économique et de l'emploi en particulier. Parce que les institutions des pays développés sont interconnectées en un réseau complexe de complémentarités, le changement institutionnel a des conséquences qui dépassent la sphère d'une réforme. Cela implique également qu'il y a des effets de complémentarité dans les réformes elles-mêmes. Le défi auquel doivent répondre les programmes de réformes est de créer un nouveau type de complémentarité entre les institutions réformées. L'article conteste, sur une base empirique, la compatibilité des réformes structurelles en cours tant sur le marché des produits que sur le marché du travail, à partir des structures institutionnelles existantes de quelques pays de l'OCDE. La cohérence de la stratégie de la flexicurité, c'est-à-dire la combinaison de la flexibilité sur le marché du travail et un État-providence généreux est également mise en cause tant du point de vue de l'efficience économique que de l'économie politique.