Mobility Costs and the Dynamics of Labor Market Adjustment to External Shocks: Theory and Estimation

各种各样的政策变化和经济冲击的影响，在很大程度上取决于劳动力从一个行业或地理位置重新分配到另一个行业或地理位置的容易程度。经济环境变化对分配的影响尤其如此。例如：(I)取消多纤维协定的分配后果，关键取决于该部门的工人在多大程度上能够在其他部门找到工作。该协定保护了美国纺织和服装业免受国际贸易的影响。(Ii)一个州削减所得税的影响取决于其他州的工人做出回应的容易程度。(Iii)移民进入该国某个地区的影响取决于该地区与其他地区之间的劳动力流动程度，这是一个对加利福尼亚州、佛罗里达州和德克萨斯州等州特别重要的问题。(4)在后共产主义国家和欠发达国家，公共部门劳动力私有化和合理化的影响取决于这样释放的工人融入其他经济部门的容易程度。(V)劳动力流动的成本决定了区域间劳动力流动在多大程度上缓解了区域劳动力需求冲击的影响。令人惊讶的是，考虑到劳动力流动成本在众多问题中发挥关键作用，几乎没有直接证据表明这些成本的大小，以及它们如何在不同的工人类别、部门和地区之间存在差异。该项目旨在填补这一空白。综合框架将考虑流动成本的经济影响的完全具体的理论模型与直接从该模型得出的估算战略结合起来，用来为不同工作人员类别产生部门间和地域流动成本的估计。这些估计值被用来回答这样的问题：熟练工人在地理上的流动性是否比非熟练工人更高，但跨行业的流动性是否更低？作为一名房主，在流动性降低方面的成本是什么？技术变革是否让熟练工人更容易转行？然后，这些估计被用来进行一些具体的政策模拟，其中包括对美国实施贸易自由化的渐进主义的可取性的研究，以及对移民对当地劳动力市场影响的分析。根据3月份当前人口调查文件28年来构建的区域兼行业单元工资和总劳动力流动的时间序列数据，为估计提供了主要基础。在执行政策分析方案时，这些数据与其他来源的数据相辅相成。

The effects of a wide variety of policy changes and economic shocks depend crucially on the ease with which labor can be reallocated from one industry or geographic location to another. This is particularly true of the distributional effects of changes in the economic environment. For example:(i) The distributional consequences of eliminating the Multifibre Arrangement, which has protected the U.S. textiles and apparel industry from international trade, depend crucially on how easily the workers in that sector can find employment in other sectors.(ii) The effects of a cut in income taxes in one state depend on how easy it is for workers in other states to move in response. (iii) The effects of immigration into a particular region of the country depend on how fluid labor is between that region and others, a question of particular importance to states such as California, Florida and Texas. (iv) The effects of privatization and rationalization of the public-sector workforce in post-communist and less developed countries depends on the ease with which the workers thus released can integrate themselves into other sectors of the economy. (v) The costs of labor mobility determine the extent to which the effects of regional labor demand shocks is mitigated by inter-regional labor flows.Surprisingly, given the wide range of issues in which the costs of labor mobility play a critical role, there is very little direct evidence on the magnitude of these costs, and how, they vary across categories of workers, sectors, and regions. This project aims to fill that gap. An integrated framework, which combines a fully-specified theoretical model within which to think about the economic implications of mobility costs with an estimation strategy that derives directly from the model, is used to generate estimates of intersectoral and geographic moving costs for various worker categories. These estimates are used to answer questions such as: Are skilled workers more mobile geographically, but less mobile across industries, than unskilled? What are the costs in terms of reduced mobility of being a homeowner? Has technical change made it easier for skilled workers to switch industries? The estimates are then used to conduct a number of specific policy simulations, among them a study of the desirability of gradualism in implementing trade liberalization in the U.S. and an analysis of the impact of immigration on local labor markets. Time-series data on wages and gross labor flows across region-cum-industry cells, constructed from 28 years of the March Current Population Survey files, provide the main basis for estimation. These data are supplemented with data from other sources in carrying out the program of policy analysis.