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难易程度。经济环境变化对分配的影响尤其如此。例如：(i)取消保护美国纺织和服装业免受国际贸易影响的《多种纤维安排》的分配后果，关键取决于该部门的工人在其他部门找到工作的难易程度。（ii）一个州削减所得税的效果取决于其他州的工人迁移的难易程度。㈢移民进入该国某一特定地区的影响取决于该地区与其他地区之间的劳动力流动情况，这一问题对加利福尼亚州、佛罗里达州和德克萨斯州等州特别重要。后共产主义国家和较不发达国家公共部门劳动力私有化和合理化的影响取决于由此获得解放的工人是否容易融入其他经济部门。劳动力流动的成本决定了区域间劳动力流动减轻区域劳动力需求冲击影响的程度。令人惊讶的是，考虑到劳动力流动成本发挥关键作用的问题范围广泛，几乎没有直接证据表明这些成本的规模，以及它们如何在不同类别的工人、部门和地区之间变化。该项目旨在填补这一空白。一个综合框架，结合了一个完全指定的理论模型，其中考虑流动成本的经济含义与直接从模型中得出的估计策略，用于产生各种工人类别的部门间和地理移动成本的估计。这些估计用于回答以下问题：与非熟练工人相比，熟练工人在地理上的流动性更高，但在行业间的流动性更低？房主流动性降低的代价是什么？技术变革是否使技术工人更容易转行？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可取性的研究，以及对移民对当地劳动力市场影响的分析。基于28年的3月份当期人口调查档案，跨区域和行业单元的工资和总劳动力流动的时间序列数据为估计提供了主要依据。在执行政策分析方案时，这些数据还补充了其他来源的数据。

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.