RUI: Geographic and Occupational Mobility During the Great Depression

在最近的金融危机、房地产市场泡沫破裂和经济衰退之后，学术界对美国地理流动性趋势的兴趣越来越大，特别是在经济波动时期的流动性行为。越来越多的证据表明，美国的地域流动性呈下降趋势，经济衰退以多种方式加剧了这种趋势。最近的研究表明，自第二次世界大战以来，流动性通常在经济衰退期间下降，在过去几年中，负资产、抵押贷款锁定和财产税锁定等住房市场因素对家庭流动性产生了强烈的负面影响。如果“大衰退”确实出现了地域流动性的周期性下降，它将揭示目前就业增长复苏的缓慢性质，并对决策产生重要影响。例如，自2009年底以来，职位空缺与失业工人的比率一直在上升。在正常情况下，职位空缺数量的增加会伴随着失业率的下降，但在过去两年中，失业率基本上没有下降。一种假设认为，这可能是劳动力市场“错配”的证据：由于异常强烈的衰退导致流动率异常强烈的下降，企业无法雇用那些本来会流动寻找工作的工人。在过去的三次经济衰退中，特别是在大萧条时期，失业率的缓慢回升是一个重要的经济学研究课题。本研究的目的是了解大萧条对20世纪30年代美国的地理和职业流动性的影响。这个研究项目将有助于我们的经济和历史的大萧条本身的理解，并通过探索大萧条对美国的地理和职业流动性的影响，我们对经济波动对流动性的影响的理解。为了实现这些目标，PI沿着一个本科研究合作者团队将构建和分析一个丰富的新数据源，使我们能够以全新的方式探索这些问题。目前对大萧条时期地理流动性的了解来自于世纪初的人口普查，这对于研究流动性和移民来说是一个不完美的来源，因为它依赖于对孩子出生地的观察来推断位置的变化;因此仅限于有年幼孩子的已婚男性。这个群体并不代表整个人口，也不代表流动率最高的亚群：年轻人、单身者和/或无子女者。最近，新的数据来源和经验技术极大地提高了我们在历史时间框架内研究流动性的能力。这里提出的研究项目将利用这些新技术和1940年人口普查的新数据，这些新数据将在2012年春季公布，以构建跨越大萧条十年和前二十年的关联面板数据集。

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, housing market bust, and recession, there has been increased scholarly interest in trends in geographic mobility in the U.S., and especially in the behavior of mobility during times of economic fluctuation. Mounting evidence points to a downward trend in geographic mobility in the U.S. exacerbated in multiple ways by the economic downturn. Recent work indicates that, since World War II, mobility has typically declined during recessions and that over the past several years housing market factors such as negative equity, mortgage lock-in, and property tax lock-in exert a strong negative effect on household mobility.If indeed the "Great Recession" has seen a cyclical fall in geographic mobility, it would shed light on the slow nature of the current recovery in employment growth and carry important implications for policy-making. For instance, since late 2009, there has been in increase in the ratio of job openings to unemployed workers. In normal times, an increase in the number of job openings would be accompanied by a fall in the unemployment rate, but for the past two years there has been essentially no associated fall in unemployment. One hypothesis suggests that this may be evidence of "mismatch" in the labor market: an inability of firms to hire workers who would otherwise move to find work, due to an unusually strong reduction in mobility rates brought on by the unusually strong recession. Determining the importance of mismatch in explaining the slow recovery of unemployment rates in the past three recessions, and especially the Great Recession, is a significant ongoing subject of economic research.The aim of this research project is to understand the effects of the Great Depression on geographic and occupational mobility in the U.S. during the 1930s. This research project will contribute to our understanding of the economics and history of the Depression itself and to our understanding of the effect of economic fluctuations on mobility generally by exploring the effects of the Great Depression on geographic and occupational mobility in the U.S. during the decade of the 1930s. To achieve these goals, the PI along with a team of undergraduate research collaborators will construct and analyze a rich new data source that will allow us to explore these issues in fundamentally new ways. What is currently known about geographic mobility during the Depression comes from the population censuses of the early twentieth century, an imperfect source for studying mobility and migration, as it depends on the observation of children's birthplaces to infer changes of location; and is therefore restricted to married men with young children. This group is not representative of the entire population, or of the sub-population with highest mobility rates: the young, single, and/or childless.Recently, new data sources and empirical techniques have dramatically increased our ability to study mobility in an historical time frame. The research project proposed here would exploit these new techniques and new data from the 1940 census that has become available in the spring of 2012 in order to construct linked panel datasets spanning the Depression decade and the two previous decades.