World Labor Market Integration and Disintegration over the Past Century

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The purpose of this research is to analyze the role of immigration, commodity trade and capital markets on the evolution of an international labor market linking Europe and the New World over the century following 1870. Rather than pursuing the traditional focus on the migrations themselves, the project will focus instead on wages and employment in sending and receiving regions, identifying episodes of labor market integration and disintegration as well as isolating the causes for these changes. Special attention will be given to the role of environmental factors leading to labor force migration such as the Irish potato famine and the environmental decay experienced by urban centers during the industrial revolution. The project will also explore the role of migration in distributing the incidence of unemployment in response to global output shocks, including identifying country experience with wage flexibility and stickiness, and how that experience is related to international migrations and the attributes of sectors which dominate sending and receiving regions. The project will also search for an endogenous explanation for the timing and location of quotas, subsidies, and other policy interventions. This research is important because it will enhance our understanding of the dynamics of labor migration and the impact of environmental change on migration.