Human Capital and Unions in the Theory of Unemployment

这项研究的目的是为了更好地理解失业的决定因素和后果。我们将探讨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，我们将探讨个人通常会积累最适用于他们所工作的行业和职业的技能这一事实的含义。对于不幸的工人来说，技术进步、需求的不利变化和国际贸易的竞争可能会减少对这些技能的需求。此外，年龄较大的员工在地域上的流动性不如年轻员工。因此，经验丰富的工人的技能供应是无弹性的，因此不利的冲击将迅速降低这些工人的工资。在某种程度上，工人可能会失业，而不是继续以远低于其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跳槽。工会加剧了技术工人失业的风险，工会可能通过在没有分配工作的工人中制造长期失业的边缘来维持高工资。随着工人从萧条的经济部门转移到扩张的经济部门，失业率下降，但这一调整过程可能非常缓慢。在不断扩大的行业中积累有价值的技能可能需要多年时间，而在不断扩大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，在当前不景气的行业中，年长的工人可能愿意等待现有职业或行业的劳动力市场状况好转，可能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，将导致这些工人未来数年的低工资和高失业率。本项目的最终目标是探讨政策如何能够减轻这些冲击的不利后果，同时鼓励工人在适当的时候转向扩大经济部门。智力价值：PI和Co-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检验特殊冲击与工人的特定人力资本和工会资历之间的相互作用。相对而言，本项目将研究的模型类型的工作很少，部分原因是此类模型以前被视为难以处理。PI和Co-PI最近的研究在这个问题上取得了进展。PI和Co-PI计划开发的技术也将有助于研究实物期权很重要的其他经济环境，例如低技术工人的移民决策、不可逆转的投资决策以及住房市场的某些方面。更广泛的影响：大多数个人的终身收入主要取决于劳动力市场的结果：个人积累人力资本的能力以及人力资本的价格如何随时间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显著影响其劳动力市场结果。虽然工会成员在美国的重要性已经下降了几十年，但最近的发展表明，工会率已经触底，现在正在上升。因此，这项研究的结果应该是相关的政策制定者和研究人员研究劳动力市场，特别是宏观经济学更普遍。这里开发的技术在其他研究实物期权的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.