Human Capital and Unions in the Theory of Unemployment

这项研究的目的是更好地理解失业的决定因素和后果。我们将探索对行业和职业的冲击如何影响不同技能水平工人的工资和失业率。特别是，我们将探索这样一个事实的含义，即个人通常积累的技能最适用于他们工作过的行业和职业。对于倒霉的工人来说，技术进步、需求的不利变化以及来自国际贸易的竞争可能会减少对这些技能的需求。此外，与年轻员工相比，年龄较大的员工在地理上的流动性较小。随之而来的是，有经验的工人的技能是缺乏弹性的，因此不利的冲击将迅速降低这些工人的工资。在某个时候，工人可能会失业，而不是继续以远低于历史水平的工资工作。相比之下，没有积累特定技能、与地理区域联系较少的年轻员工更有可能搬家。工会加剧了熟练工人的失业风险，工会可能会在没有分配工作的工人中制造长期失业的边缘，从而维持高工资。随着工人从低迷的经济部门转移到扩张的经济部门，失业率下降，但这个调整过程可能非常缓慢。积累在不断扩张的行业中有价值的技能可能需要多年时间，而在不断扩张的行业联盟中获得资历也可能是一个非常缓慢的过程。因此，在目前不景气的行业中，年龄较大的工人可能愿意等待很长一段时间，等待现有职业或行业的劳动力市场状况改善，可能会在他们重返工作岗位之前退休。缺乏对熟练工人的重新分配，可能会导致这类工人数年来的低工资和高失业率。这个项目的最终目标是探索政策如何在适当的时候改善这些冲击的不利后果，同时鼓励工人转向扩大经济部门。智力优势：PI和共同PI提出了一种新的失业理论。基于经济学文献中其他地方开发的技术，他们将使用易于分析的模型来研究特质冲击与工人特定的人力资本和在工会中的资历之间的相互作用。关于该项目将研究的模型类型的工作相对较少，部分原因是此类模型以前被视为难以处理。近年来，PI和Co-PI在这一问题上的研究取得了进展。PI和Co-Pi计划开发的技术也将有助于研究其他实际选择很重要的经济环境，例如低技能工人的移民决策、不可逆转的投资决策，以及房地产市场的某些方面。广泛影响：大多数人的终生收入主要由劳动力市场结果决定：个人积累人力资本的能力有多大，以及人力资本价格随时间的波动是这些结果的重要决定因素。此外，对于作为工会成员的工人来说，对该工会提供的服务的需求以及工会为其成员分配工作的机制对她的劳动力市场结果有很大影响。尽管工会成员在美国的重要性几十年来一直在下降，但最近的事态发展表明，工会率已经触底，现在正在上升。因此，这项研究的发现应该与研究劳动力市场的政策制定者和研究人员相关，尤其是对宏观经济学更广泛的研究。这里开发的技术在研究实物期权的其他经济学领域也很有用，包括投资和金融。

The objective of this research is to better understand the determinants and consequences of unemployment. We will explore how shocks to industries and occupations affect the wages and unemployment rates of workers with different skills levels. In particular, we will explore the implications of the fact that individuals typically accumulate skills which are most applicable to the industries and occupations where they have worked. For unlucky workers, technological progress, adverse shifts in demand, and competition from international trade may reduce the demand for these skills. Moreover, older workers are less geographically mobile than younger workers. It follows that the skills of experienced workers are supplied inelastically and so adverse shocks will quickly lower these workers' wages. At some point, a worker may become unemployed rather than continue to work at a wage far below his historical level. In contrast, younger workers who have not accumulated specific skills and who are less tied to a geographic area are more likely to move. The risk of unemployment for skilled workers is exacerbated by labor unions, which may sustain high wages by creating a fringe of long-term unemployment among workers who are not allocated jobs. Unemployment falls as workers move from the depressed to the expanding sectors of the economy, but this adjustment process may be very slow. Accumulating skills valuable in the expanding sectors can take many years, and earning seniority in the union of the expanding sector may also be a very slow process. Therefore older workers in a currently depressed sector may be willing to wait a long time for labor market conditions to improve in their existing occupation or industry, possibly retiring before they ever return to work. This lack of reallocation of skilled workers creates the prospect of years of low wages and high unemployment rates for such workers. The final goal of this project is to explore how policies can ameliorate the adverse consequences of these shocks while encouraging workers to move towards expanding sectors of the economy when appropriate.Intellectual Merit: The PI and Co-PI propose a novel theory of unemployment. Building on techniques developed elsewhere in the economics literature, they will use analytically tractable models to examine the interaction between idiosyncratic shocks and the worker's specific human capital and seniority in the labor union. There has been relatively little work on the type of model that this project will investigate, in part because such models were previously viewed as intractable. Recent research by the PI and Co-PI has made progress on this issue. The techniques the PI and Co-PI plan to develop will also be useful for studying other economic environments where real options are important, such as the migration decision for low skilled workers, irreversible investment decisions, as well as some aspects of the housing market.Broader Impacts: The lifetime incomes of most individuals are primarily determined by labor market outcomes: how capable the individuals are of accumulating human capital and how the price of that human capital fluctuates over time are important determinants of those outcomes. In addition, for a worker who is a member of a labor union, the demand for the services provided by that union and the mechanism by which the union assigns jobs to its members significantly affects her labor market outcomes. Although union membership has declined in importance in the U.S. for several decades, recent developments suggest that unionization rates have bottomed out and are now increasing. Thus the findings of this study should be relevant for policymakers and researchers studying labor markets in particular, and macroeconomics more generally. The techniques developed here are useful in other fields in economics that study real options, including investment and finance.