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

流动成本和劳动力市场对外部冲击的调整动态：理论和估计

• 批准号: 0080731
• 负责人: Shubham Chaudhuri
• 金额: $ 23.69万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2000
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2000-07-15 至 2004-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0080731&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Mobility; Costs; Dynamics; Labor; Market

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.

各种各样的政策变化和经济冲击的影响，关键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。经济环境的变化对分配的影响尤其如此。例如：（i）取消保护美国纺织品和服装业免受国际贸易影响的《多种纤维协定》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是否容易做出反应。(iii)移民进入美国某个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程度，这个问题对加州、佛罗里达和得克萨斯等州尤为重要。(iv)后共产主义国家和欠发达国家公共部门劳动力的私有化和合理化的效果取决于这样释放出来的工人是否容易融入其他经济部门。(v)劳动力流动的成本决定了地区间劳动力流动对地区劳动力需求冲击的缓解程度。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很广，几乎没有直接证据表明这些成本的大小，以及它们如何在工人类别、部门和地区之间变化。该项目旨在填补这一空白。一个综合的框架，它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影响与估计战略，直接从模型中得出，用于产生不同工人类别的跨部门和地理移动成本的估计。这些估计数用于回答以下问题：与非熟练工人相比，熟练工人是否在地理上更具移动的性，但在行业间的移动的性较低？作为一个房主，流动性降低的成本是什么？技术变革是否使技术工人更容易转换行业？ 然后，利用这些估计值进行了一系列具体的政策模拟，其中包括研究美国在实施贸易自由化时采取渐进主义的可取性，以及分析移民对当地劳动力市场的影响。 根据3月当前人口调查文件的28年构建的关于地区兼行业单元的工资和总劳动力流动的时间序列数据，为估计提供了主要基础。在执行政策分析方案时，这些数据得到其他来源数据的补充。