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We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression kink design that exploits the quasi-experimental variation around the kink in the UI benefit schedule. We find that UI durations are more responsive to benefit levels during the recession and its aftermath, with an elasticity between 0.65 and 0.9 as compared to about 0.35 pre-recession.

In countries confronting the issue of low fertility such as Japan, dual trends showing higher regional population density associated with lower fertility rates are being confirmed. It is therefore an important theme for analysis to deepen discussions related to reducing regional fertility disparities by increasing fertility through the implementation of comprehensive childcare support policies, which might facilitate the striking of a balance between child-rearing and work, even in highly populated regions. As described herein, we constructed a simple theoretical two-region overlapping generations (OLG) by incorporating migration and land prices. Using it, we analyzed the effects of population density and childcare services on fertility. Results elucidated the following three points. First, in the presence of congestion costs associated with increased population density, the fertility rate of the region decreases with increased population density. However, if the time cost of child-rearing is brought down by raising the level of the childcare services provided in the region, then the effect of increased population density on fertility can be restrained. Second, when the effect of population size on productivity is less than a certain level, improvement in the childcare services raises the relative ratio of the population density. When the effect of population size on productivity exceeds a certain level, however, the relative ratio of the population density decreases if the relative ratio of the time cost of child-rearing decreases as a result of childcare service reform. Third, where each region imposes a payroll tax on its residents and uses its tax revenue as the financial resources to adopt a decentralized strategy of providing childcare services to its region, the level of childcare services that maximizes the utility of a representative agent in each region is independent of the childcare services of any other region. Therefore, manipulation of the level of childcare services becomes a dominant strategy.

I employ high quality register data and present new facts about income mobility in Sweden. The focus of the paper is regional mobility using a novel estimation approach based on a multilevel model. The maximum likelihood estimates are substantially more precise than those obtained by running separate OLS regressions. I find small regional differences in income mobility when measured in relative terms. Regional differences are large when adopting an absolute measure and focusing on upward mobility. On the national level I find that the association between parent and child income ranks has decreased over time, implying increased mobility.

Human capital is a driving factor of innovation and economic growth. Economic prospects of cities depend on high qualified workers' knowledge and therefore, attracting highly qualified workers plays a fundamental role for cities' prospects. This study contributes to the question which factors primarily determine the mobility-decision of highly qualified workers by investigating the determinants of the migration balance of German cities between 2000 and 2010. Furthermore, it compares the effects of several labour- and amenity-related variables on migration rates of highly qualified workers and the remaining workforce. Findings suggest that local labour market conditions influence the mobility decision but amenities matter too for the high-skilled. The preferences of the highly qualified workers partly differ from those of the rest of the workforce. However, there are also several factors that do not show systematic differences across skill groups.

I construct an immigration policy index which is heterogeneous across destination-origin country pairs and variant over time. This index is based on three types of entry visa restrictions: visa required, visa not required for short stays and visa not required at all. When estimated in levels, visa exempt country pairs account for around 15% more migrants than their counterfactual. I show that the effects of migration determinants vary by the type of visa restrictions. Further, I identify country pairs which changed their visa regime during 2000-2010 and find that the weakening of visa policy is associated with a 10% increase in migrant stocks and a significant shift toward male and less skilled migration from policy affected source countries. In contrast, the tightening of visa policy is not related to a significant change in migrant stocks, their gender or skill composition.

We assess empirically the changes in returns to education at the subnational level in Uganda using the Uganda National Household Surveys for 2002/2003 and 2005/2006. Our results indicate that average returns to schooling tended to converge across regions in the last decade. The overall trend in convergence of returns to schooling took place at all levels of educational attainment and this behaviour in returns to education is mostly driven by the dynamics of returns to schooling in urban areas. We analyse subnational convergence in returns to education and unveil deviant dynamics in Northern Uganda. We discuss the potential challenges to inclusive economic growth in Uganda which are implied by our results. (authors' abstract)

During the 1990s the Kagera region of Tanzania experienced a forced migration shock. A series of geographical barriers led to a higher concentration of forced migrants in some parts of the region relative to others, resulting in a natural experiment. Using panel data (pre and post forced migration shock), we find that greater exposure to the refugee shock resulted in Tanzanians having a lower likelihood of working outside the household as employees. However, employees more affected by the shock had a higher probability of being in professional occupations and being part of a pensions program.

Trade economists have long studied the effects of globalization on wage differences between workers with different levels of skill or education. 1 This literature has generally sought to link globalization to changes in the economy-wide skill premium. Attanasio, Goldberg, and Pavcnik (2004) and Gonzaga, Menezes Filho, and Terra (2006) are salient examples that investigate whether changes in sector-specific prices or tariffs, changes in skill composition within and across sectors, and movements in the skill premium are consistent with the predictions of workhorse trade models, such as the HeckscherOhlin model. However, there is little evidence directly establishing a causal effect of globalization on the skill premium. 2 More recently, a growing body of research has focused on trade’s differential effects across local markets within a country. 3 In this paper, we combine these two strands of literature by developing a theoretically consistent approach to studying the causal

This paper argues that the more open a city is to immigration, the more likely it is to welcome -- and hence also receive -- foreign direct investment. If immigration is allowed to complement the inflow of foreign capital, urban rent rises by more. This extra rise in rent aids in appeasing owners of capital specific to local traditional industries who else become worse off as foreign direct investment flows in. The paper's model may help give a simple alternative explanation of why urban centers such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Dublin or many cities on China's Eastern coast have received so much more FDI per capita. These cities could draw on a nearby pool of extra labor that -- by driving rents up and keeping wages down -- may have been decisive in the political struggle over whether to let foreign direct investors in.

The international movement of economic factors such as capital and skilled labor has complex effects on the economies involved, especially when multiple factors move at the same time. One important effect is the potential change in wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labor—particularly, in developing countries that have agreed to trade with developed countries. This study considers a small open economy with two goods and three factors to determine whether wage inequality increases or decreases due to increased movement of these factors. The key findings are that wage inequality can unambiguously increase and decrease, under certain circumstances regarding the capital intensity of the sector(s), the initial amount of foreign factors, and the shares of factors in national income.

Many countries are reviewing immigration policy, focusing on wage and employment effects for workers whose jobs may be threatened by immigration. Less attention is given to effects on prices of goods and services. The effect on childcare prices is particularly relevant to policies for dealing with the gender pay gap and below-replacement fertility rates, both thought to be affected by the difficulty of combining work and family. New research suggests immigration lowers the cost of household services and high-skilled women respond by working more or having more children.

Relying on census data collected in 2002 and historical weather data for Uganda, this paper estimates the impact of weather-induced internal migration on the probability for non-migrants living in the destination regions to be employed. Consistent with the prediction of a simple theoretical model, the results reveal a larger negative impact than the one documented for developed countries. They further show that this negative impact is significantly stronger in Ugandan regions with lower road density and therefore less conducive to capital mobility: a 10 percentage points increase in the net in-migration rate in these areas decreases the probability of being employed of non-migrants by more than 10 percentage points.

International audience; The paper tests evidence of customer discrimination against African-Americans in the US using a two-sector matching model with racial sector-specific preferences or abilities, employer discrimination, and customer discrimination. The test strategy makes it possible to disentangle customer from pure employer discrimination. This paper proves the existence of discrimination against African-Americans at job entry from both employers and consumers in the US. It also reports that racial prejudice has a quantitative effect on the relative employment and contact probabilities of African-Americans. A decrease in the intensity of discrimination by one standard deviation would raise the raw employment rate of African-Americans by 10% and would increase the proportion of African-Americans in jobs in contact with customers by 25%.

A large theoretical and empirical literature suggests that the salience of network-based ties in contract enforcement under relation-based governance systems limits market expansion. This paper illustrates the incorporation of new agents into market exchange under conditions of informal contract governance using a case study of the cycle-rickshaw rental market in a city in central India. Our analytical model formalizes features of this market through a higher penalty of default for migrants that introduces a gap between the ex ante risk for out-of-network agents and the ex post risk. The model predicts a sorting equilibrium such that migrants are more likely to participate in the rental contract. We test this prediction using primary survey data with multi-dimensional measures of migrant status and find that it is a significant predictor of rental contract participation, even controlling for credit access and other variables that moderate the rickshaw driver's ability to own a cycle-rickshaw.

This study identifies and analyzes the effects of university/college graduates’ personal, household and employment characteristics as well as the attributes of their study, work and home locations on their college-to-work, college-to-residence, and commuting distances. The results illustrate that graduates are drawn to prospering regions with ample job opportunities, supposedly in order to advance their careers. They choose their places of residence so as to balance their commuting distances and the distances to their previous places of study. Residential amenities have a comparatively small effect on graduates’ locational choices, whereas they appear to value accessibility of the place of residence. JEL classifications: R23, R41 Keywords: distance, migration, locational choice, commuting, college-to-work, college-to-residence

In 2007-08, short-term migrants constituted 4.35 per cent of the rural workforce. A total of 9.25 million households in rural India had short-term migrants.Using a nationally representative data for rural India, this paper examines differences in consumption expenditure across households with and without a household member who is a short-migrant. We use an instrumental variable approach to control for the presence of a short-term migrant in a household. We find that households with a short-term migrant have lower monthly per capita consumption expenditure and monthly per capita food expenditure compared to households without a short-term migrant. Short-term migrants are not unionised, they work in the unorganised sector, they do not have written job contracts and state governments are yet to ensure that the legislations protecting them are properly enforced. This could be one of the reasons why we do not observe higher levels of expenditure in households with such migrants.

This paper extends existing research on regional quality of life in Germany by newly estimating the role of region-specific (dis-)amenities in the determination of regional housing rents and wages. Different from previous studies, the empirical analysis draws on functional labor market areas recently delineated by Kosfeld and Werner [Raumf Raumordn (2012) 70: 49-64] rather than administrative jurisdictions, circumventing problems of spatial autocorrelation. Consistent with cross-region spatial equilibrium, the results indicate that labor market area heterogeneity in housing rents and wages is closely related to differences in non-market attributes that affect household utility. The results enable the construction of a comprehensive ranking of regional quality of life which can be directly compared to the findings of previous studies.

Previous research suggests that the local stock of human capital creates positive externalities within local labor markets and plays an important role in regional economic development. However, there is still considerable uncertainty over what types of human capital are most important. Both national and local policymakers in the U.S. have called for efforts to increase the stock of college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, but data availability has thus far prevented researchers from directly connecting STEM education to human capital externalities. This paper uses the 2009–2011 American Community Survey to examine the external effects of college graduates in STEM and non-STEM fields on the wages of other workers in the same metropolitan area. I find that both types of college graduates create positive wage externalities, but STEM graduates create much larger externalities.

The relation between income and migration intentions can be monotonically decreasing, increasing, or inverse U-shaped, dependent on the level of migration cost relative to wealth and if individuals are credit constrained. Using unique individual level data, covering countries in three geographic regions – sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America – we show that migration intentions respond to individual wealth, and that the pattern differs across the country groups studied in a manner compatible with the predictions of our simple model. We also show that contentment with various dimensions of local amenities, such as public services and security, are key determinants of migration intentions.

US labor markets have experienced rising inequality over the past 30 years—as evidenced by an increased gap in wages earned by high-skill workers (e.g., college graduates) and low-skill workers (e.g., high school graduates). Empirical evidence documenting this evolution of inequality comes from studies that assess wage-education gradients at the national level. But of course people work in local labor markets that differ in important ways. We provide a theoretical framework for evaluating inequality changes when individuals work in local labor markets, and we give an empirical reassessment of inequality changes in light of the insights that emerge from our framework.

The spatial distribution of human capital plays a fundamental role for regional differences in economic growth and welfare. This paper examines how individual ability indicated by the grade point average (GPA), from comprehensive school, affects the probability of migration among young university graduates in Sweden. Using detailed micro data available from the Swedish population registers, the study examines two cohorts of individuals who enrol in tertiary education. The results indicate that individual abilities reflected by the GPA are strongly influential when it comes to completing a university degree and for the migration decision after graduation. Moreover, there is a positive relationship between the GPA and the choice of migrating from regions with a relatively low tax base and a relatively small share of highly educated people in the population. Analogously, individuals with a high GPA tend to stay at a higher rate in more flourishing regions.

This study uses cross-sectional data to investigate regional differences in women's participation in the labor market. Women's participation is high in the northern coastal region of Japan. This high rate of participation is caused by the fact that married women with children participate as regular full-time employees. Supply and demand factors explain part of the differences, but regional effects remain even after controlling for them. I attribute the high participation in the northern coastal region to long-standing norms regarding women's work.

Chances are high that not both partners in dual-earner couples stay in employment after long-distance moves, because jobs are distributed heterogeneously in space. Previous research shows that women are more likely to leave employment than men. I extend this literature by adding evidence from Germany and by comparing the effects of moves in Britain, West and East Germany with data from the BHPS and the SOEP. My results show that women in dual-earner couples are more likely to leave employment after moves in Britain and West Germany compared to stayers, while women in East Germany are not adversely affected.Read More: http://ejournals.duncker-humblot.de/doi/abs/10.3790/schm.133.2.133

Bande R. and Karanassou M. Spanish regional unemployment revisited: the role of capital accumulation, Regional Studies. This paper provides new evidence for the evolution of regional unemployment rates in Spain over the period between 1980 and 2000. It argues that interactive dynamic systems of labour demand, wage setting and labour force equations (1) allow for a richer interpretation of regional disparities, and (2) can capture the unemployment effects of growing variables such as capital stock. After classifying the seventeen Spanish regions into high and low unemployment groups using kernel and cluster techniques, a structural labour market model is estimated for each group and the unemployment contributions of investment, benefits, taxes and the oil price are evaluated. It is found that the main driving force of regional unemployment swings is capital accumulation.

This paper demonstrates that low-skilled Mexican-born immigrants’ location choices in the U.S. respond strongly to changes in local labor demand, and that this geographic elasticity helps equalize spatial differences in labor market outcomes for low-skilled native workers, who are much less responsive. We leverage the substantial geographic variation in employment losses that occurred during Great Recession, and our results confirm the standard finding that high-skilled populations are quite geographically responsive to employment opportunities while low-skilled populations are much less so. However, low-skilled immigrants, especially those from Mexico, respond even more strongly than high-skilled native-born workers. These results are robust to a wide variety of controls, a pre-recession falsification test, and two instrumental variables strategies. Moreover, we show that natives living in metro areas with a substantial Mexican-born population are insulated from the effects of local labor demand shocks compared to those in places with few Mexicans. The reallocation of the Mexican-born workforce reduced the incidence of local demand shocks on low-skilled natives’ employment outcomes by roughly 40 percent.

With around 50% of the urban men between age 15 and 30 unemployed, Ethiopia has one of the highest unemployment rates worldwide. This paper describes the nature of unemployment among young men in urban Ethiopia. We analyse the determinants of incidence and duration and find that most variables have the same effect on both. Unemployment is concentrated among relatively well-educated first time job seekers who come from the middle classes. Mean duration of unemployment is close to four years and is higher for those aspiring to a public sector job. The unemployed have realistic reservation wages. Those living in Addis are less likely to become unemployed, and ethnicity has no effect. We find that both the incidence and duration of unemployment are negatively related to household welfare. Since we cannot reject that the latter is endogenous, this suggests that households use their savings and cut back consumption to cope with unemployment. Those with a father working as a civil servant have shorter durations, suggesting that this provides an information advantage. The medium of job search also has a strong effect indicating that information is costly. Social networks only help after one has become unemployed. Our results are robust to changes in the macro environment. We explain why people do not take up a job while waiting in unemployment.

This paper estimates the “jobs multiplier” of fiscal stimulus spending using the state-level allocations of federal stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. Because the level and timing of stimulus funds that a state receives was potentially endogenous, I exploit the fact that most of these funds were allocated according to exogenous formulary allocation factors such as the number of federal highway miles in a state or its youth share of population. Cross-state IV results indicate that ARRA spending in its first year yielded about eight jobs per million dollars spent, or $125,000 per job. (JEL E24, E62, H72, H75, R23)

This study develops an on-the-job search model involving spatial structure. In this model, workers are either employed and commuting frequently to a central business district (CBD) or unemployed and commuting less frequently to the CBD to search for a job. When an unemployed worker succeeds in off-the-job search, the quality of the job match is determined stochastically: a good match yields high-productivity whereas a bad match yields low-productivity. Although a high-productivity worker does not search for a new job, a lowproductivity worker decides whether to conduct an on-the-job search, which would require additional commuting to the CBD. Analysis of this model demonstrates that in equilibrium, the relocation path of workers corresponds to their career path, while welfare analysis demonstrates that such a spatial structure distorts firms f decision regarding the posting of vacancies.

We study the interactions among geographical mobility, unemployment, and home-ownership in an economy with heterogeneous locations, endogenous construction, and search frictions in the markets for both labour and housing. The decision of home-owners to accept job offers from other cities depends on how quickly they can sell their houses (i.e. the houses' liquidity), which in turn depends on local labour market conditions. Consequently, home-owners accept job offers from other cities at a lower rate than do renters, generating a link between home-ownership and unemployment both at the city level and in the aggregate. When calibrated to match aggregate U.S. statistics on mobility, housing, and labour flows, the model predicts that the effect of home-ownership on aggregate unemployment is small. When unemployment is high, however, changes in the rate of home-ownership can have economically significant effects. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 included $88 billion of aid to state governments administered through the Medicaid reimbursement process. We examine the effect of these transfers on states' employment. Because state fiscal relief outlays are endogenous to a state's economic environment, OLS results are biased downward. We address this problem by using a state's pre-recession Medicaid spending level to instrument for ARRA state fiscal relief. In our preferred specification, a state's receipt of a marginal $100,000 in Medicaid outlays results in an additional 3.8 job-years, 3.2 of which are outside the government, health, and education sectors. (JEL H75, I18, I38, R23)

Over the past few decades of economic reform, China's labor markets have been transformed to an increasingly market-driven system. China has two segregated economies: the rural and urban. Understanding the shifting nature of this divide is probably the key to understanding the most important labor market reform issues of the last decades and the decades ahead. From 1949, the Chinese economy allowed virtually no labor mobility between the rural and urban sectors. Rural-urban segregation was enforced by a household registration system called “hukou.” Individuals born in rural areas receive “agriculture hukou” while those born in cities are designated as “nonagricultural hukou.” In the countryside, employment and income were linked to the commune-based production system. Collectively owned communes provided very basic coverage for health, education, and pensions. In cities, state-assigned life-time employment, centrally determined wages, and a cradle-to-grave social welfare system were implemented. In the late 1970s, China's economic reforms began, but the timing and pattern of the changes were quite different across rural and urban labor markets. This paper focuses on employment and wages in the urban labor markets, the interaction between the urban and rural labor markets through migration, and future labor market challenges. Despite the remarkable changes that have occurred, inherited institutional impediments still play an important role in the allocation of labor; the hukou system remains in place, and 72 percent of China's population is still identified as rural hukou holders. China must continue to ease its restrictions on rural–urban migration, and must adopt policies to close the widening rural–urban gap in education, or it risks suffering both a shortage of workers in the growing urban areas and a deepening urban–rural economic divide.

This paper, using individual data from Japan, explores how the circumstances of where a person resides is related to the degree of their investment in social capital. Controlling for unobserved area-specific fixed effects and various individual characteristics, I found: (1) not only is the rate of homeowners in a locality positively related to investment in social capital, but also the rate of homeownership there increases an individual's investment in social capital and (2) the effect of local neighborhood homeownership is distinctly larger than that of an individual's when endogeneity bias is controlled for using instruments such as land price and the rental price of an apartment.

This paper considers the effects of the local human capital level and the presence of higher education institutions on the quality of life in U.S. metropolitan areas. The local human capital level is measured by the share of adults with a college degree, and the relative importance of higher education institutions is measured by the share of the population enrolled in college. This paper finds that quality of life is positively affected by both the local human capital level and the relative importance of higher education institutions. Furthermore, these effects persist when these two measures are considered simultaneously, even though the two are highly correlated. That is the human capital stock and higher education institutions have a shared effect and also separate effects on quality of life.

This paper provides supportive evidence to the notion that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the (local) market. We first propose a theoretical model. Its main prediction is that scarce specialists occupations are over-represented in large cities. Using census data for French cities, we find strong empirical support for this prediction.

This paper analyzes the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. We find that a substantial part of the growth in inequality, and essentially all of the growth in inequality in the bottom end of the distribution, is due to the steep decline in the real value of the minimum wage. (JEL J31, J38, O15, O17, O18, R23)

During the Great Depression, as today, migrants were accused of taking jobs and crowding relief rolls. At the time, protest concerned internal migrants rather than the foreign born. We investigate the effect of net migration on local labor markets, instrumenting for migrant flows to a destination with extreme weather events and variation in New Deal programs in typical sending areas. Migration had little effect on the hourly earnings of existing residents. Instead, migration prompted some residents to move away and others to lose weeks of work and/or access to relief jobs. Given the period?s high unemployment, these lost work opportunities were costly to existing residents.

Nine Austrian NUTS 2 inter- and intraindustrial job-to-job worker flows for 33 industries are analysed by means of input-output techniques, with these job-to-job flows being an intermediate input in the production of filled vacancies. A new dataset on individual labour market episodes allows for the tracing of individual careers. A linkage analysis of the Leontief multiplier shows that business services, wholesale&retail and the metal industry are ‘key’ industries in for- and backwarding employment, whereas construction and tourism exert an impact on other regional industries by absorbing workers upon aggregate external shocks. These findings can be incorporated in industrial employment forecasts or utilized in regional labour market impact studies.

The objective of this paper is to employ the Hurricane Katrina evacuation into Houston, TX as a natural experiment to estimate the effect of large scale in-migration on regional earnings. Given the characteristics of the evacuees, their influx would have caused the supply of applicants for lower skilled jobs to increase proportionately more than for higher skilled jobs. We utilize a differences-in-differences-in-differences methodology in which we compare differences in average earnings in the low-skill, non-traded goods industries to the corresponding differences in the set of high skill industries in the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth MSAs before and after the Katrina-induced migration. Unlike previous studies, we include a measure of the post-storm increase in demand for local goods and services on the demand for labor. We find evidence that the relative average payroll in the low-skill non-tradable goods industries in Houston decreased by .7% when compared to the relative change for the same group of industries in Dallas. Our findings also suggest that failure to account for demand-side influences following the migration results in significant under-estimation of wage effects due to the shift in labor supply.

Recent literature reviews conclude that job displacement results in sustained earnings losses (Bruce C. Fallick 1996; Lori G. Kletzer 1998) and that estimates of the size of those reductions vary with the type of data used in the analysis, the industry within which displacement occurs, and business cycle conditions. The largest estimated losses were obtained using administrative data from Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s (Louis S. Jacobson, Robert J. LaLonde, and Daniel G. Sullivan 1993a). The data covered a period of high unemployment in a heavily indus trialized state characterized by disproportionate job losses in manufacturing. Thus, the ability to generalize those results to more favorable economic times and states with a greater reliance on service sector employment has been questioned. To address these issues, administrative data are used to similarly examine the impact of job displacement on earnings losses of workers in Connecticut from 1993 to 2004. The work of Jacobson, LaLonde, and Sullivan (JLS) also provided important methodologi cal advancement by adapting analytical techniques developed for program evaluation (James J. Heckman and V. Joseph Hotz 1989) to the context of job displacement. The same techniques (fixed-effects and time trend estimators) as those used in the original JLS publication are initially employed here. Then, the methods are extended to include matching estimators developed since their publication. Both nearest neighbor estimators of Average Treatment on the Treated (ATT) and Differenced Average Treatment on the Treated (DATT) are adapted to the context of this study (Heckman, Hidehiko Ichimura, and Petra Todd 1997; Heckman et al. 1998; and Rajeev H. Dehejia and Sadek Wahba 1999, 2002). The results presented here for Connecticut differ in some ways from those found in the work of JLS using data from Pennsylvania. In the period immediately following job loss, regardless of the technique employed, earnings reductions for workers displaced through mass layoff range from 32 percent to 33 percent; JLS reported immediate losses of more than 40 percent. Six years later, using the same estimators as JLS, earnings reductions in Connecticut range from 13 percent to 15 percent; they report sustained losses in Pennsylvania of 25 percent. The smaller long-term impacts in Connecticut demonstrate that under more ordinary economic times, esti mated losses from administrative data lie within the range observed using other data sources. This finding resolves a long-standing conflict among the results of high-quality studies that have used differing data sources to study earnings reductions following job loss.1 Using two different matching estimators, earnings losses six years after mass layoff are 12 percent. The matching estimators compare those who experienced mass layoff to compari sons with the same ex ante probability of the event. These smaller losses are consistent with the

In this paper, a survey is presented of the recent developments in two empirical literatures at the crossroads of labour and urban economics: studies about localised human capital externalities (HCE) and about the urban wage premium (UWP). After surveying the methods and main results of each of these two literatures separately, several interrelations between them are highlighted. In particular, the discussion focuses on whether HCE can be interpreted as one fundamental cause of the UWP and whether one literature can learn conceptually from the other.

This article shows, using data from both the USA and the UK, that average plant size is larger in denser markets. However, many popular theories of agglomeration-spillovers, cost advantages and improved match quality-predict that establishments should be smaller in cities. The article proposes a theory based on monopsony in labour markets-firms in all labour markets have some market power but that they have less market power in cities-that can explain the stylized fact. It also presents evidence that the labour supply curve to individual firms is more elastic in larger markets, consistent with the monopsony hypothesis.

Previous research on the labour market outcomes of spatially mobile couples has shown that mobility has serious detrimental effects on the employment situation of women. This has been largely attributed to their prevalence as secondary earners playing a minor role in job-related mobility decisions of the household. Yet the impact of regional opportunity structures in determining labour market outcomes of mobile coupled females has been neglected, although recent studies suggest the significance of this aspect. Using the SOEP 1992–2006 the following analysis investigates the consequences of mobility for women taking into account the economic structure of the destination region. JEL Classifications: D1, J16, J61, R23

This paper aims to shed light in the dynamics of Spanish regional unemployment rates and determine the driving forces of their disparities. The Spanish economy has one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU and is characterised by severe regional disparities. We apply the chain reaction theory of unemployment according to which the evolution of unemployment is driven by the interplay of lagged adjustment processes and the spillover effects within the labour market system. Our model includes nationwide as well as region-specific variables, and takes into account the limited labour and firm mobility in Spain. We show that the degree of labour market flexibility differs between high and low unemployment regions, and find that investment has a major influence on the unemployment trajectory. In addition, we find that in bad times high unemployment regions are hit more severely than low unemployment regions, while in good times high unemployment regions do not benefit as much as low unemployment regions.

This study investigates temporal demographic changes and income inequalities, and more importantly the relationship between income inequality and economic growth inWest Virginia. Departing from earlier studies, a regional growth model is utilized and empirically tested using county level West Virginia data (1990-2000). Results suggest that per-capita income change is positively related to population and employment changes but negatively related to income inequality. This empirical evidence indicates that higher income inequality can potentially hinder economic growth.

The aim of our paper is to identify explanatory variables for income disparities between women and men across different regional types. Using data from the BA Employment Panel (BEP) descriptive statistics show that the gender pay gap grows wider from core regions to periphery. The main explanatory variables for the income differentials are vocational education in the men's case and size of enterprise in the women's case. Whereas in the case of women the importance of vocational status increases and the importance of size of enterprise decreases from rural areas to urban areas.

Currently, a growing literature is emerging on estimating the impact of exogenous shocks using the difference-in-difference (DD) tech? nique. Essentially, this technique compares the impact of an unexpected event in a particu? lar locale (called the treatment/experimental group) to a location or set of locations (called a control group) similar to the experimental group in all respects except for the shock itself. One challenge many DD studies face is how to choose the control group, and there is now a growing literature on this (Joshua A. Angrist and Alan B. Krueger 1999; Jeffrey D. Kubik and John R. Moran 2003; and Alberto Abadie, Alexis Diamond, and Jens Hainmueller 2007). Another challenge is whether one can general? ize one's results based on a single experimental group, as is typical for most DD analysis. This paper adopts a generalized-difference-in-dif ference (GDD) technique outlined in Ariel R. Belasen and Solomon W. Polachek (forthcom? ing) to examine the impact of hurricanes on the labor market. This technique incorporates many experimental as well as many control groups, and as such this approach addresses a number of shortcomings in current DD analyses. We find that earnings of the average worker in a Florida county rise over 4 percent within the first quarter of being hit by a major Category Four or Five hur? ricane relative to counties not hit, and rise about Wa percent for workers in Florida counties hit by less major Category One to Three hurricanes. Concomitantly, employment falls between Wi and 5 percent depending on hurricane strength. On the other hand, the effects of hurricanes on neighboring counties have the opposite effects, moving earnings down between 3 and 4 percent in the quarter the hurricane struck. To better examine the specific shocks, we also observe sectoral employment shifts. Finally, we conduct a time-series analysis and find that, over time, there is somewhat of a cobweb, with earnings and employment rising and falling each quarter over a two-year time period.

Locally increasing returns is the source of industrial agglomeration, and it improves regional labour productivity and drives up regional inequality. Using data of 261 cities in 2004 in China, I find that the estimated elasticity of (average) labor productivity with respect to employment density is about 8.8%, compared with 5% in the USA and 4.5% in the EU. Further, I find that the difference of agglomeration effects among provinces exists two cases: insignificant difference and significant difference. However, under the polarization of industrial location, both two cases enlarge the inequality of labor productivity among provinces, and drive up the divergence of regional income.

Existing studies have explored either only one or two of the mechanisms that human capital externalities percolate at only macrogeographic levels. This paper, by using the 1990 Massachusetts census data, tests four mechanisms at the microgeographic levels in the Boston metropolitan area labor market. We propose that individual workers can learn from their occupational and industrial peers in the same local labor market through four channels: depth of human capital stock, Marshallian labor market externalities, Jacobs labor market externalities, and thickness of the local labor market. We find that all types of human capital externalities are significant across census tracts and blocks. Marshallian labor market externalities and the effect of labor market thickness in terms of industry employment density are significant at the block level. The mechanisms of knowledge spillovers vary across industries and occupations. Different types of externalities attenuate at different speeds over geographic distances. The effect of labor market thickness -- in terms of industry employment density -- decays rapidly beyond 1.5 miles away from block centroid; the effect of human capital depth decays rapidly beyond three miles; while Jacobs externalities decay very slowly, indicating a certain degree of urbanization economies. We conclude that knowledge spillovers are very localized within microgeographic scope in cities that we call, "Smart Cafe Cities."

Many argue that tourism development is beneficial for local economies, partly because of spillover effects. Others hold that tourism jobs are lower paying, often seasonal, and can generate a host of social ills with earned income concentrated in low-income households. A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) of a Pennsylvania region is used to test the impacts of tourism businesses supported by the Progress Fund a regional Community Development Financial Institution, on household income distribution by incorporating secondary and primary employment based income. Analysis indicates that tourism-oriented activity has relatively large contributions to lower and upper as opposed to middle income households.

Despite the surging interest in entrepreneurship as an economic development strategy, studies of the independent relationship between proprietorship formations and job growth are virtually non-existent. We find that self-employment or proprietorship rates are associated with faster job growth in the wage-and-salary sector, and the effect is statistically significant. The relative magnitude of this effect varies with the business cycle, being stronger during economic expansions and weaker during contractions. Further, the effect is stronger in metropolitan than in non-metropolitan counties.