nep-lab New Economics Papers
on Labour Economics
Issue of 2019‒02‒04
twenty papers chosen by
Joseph Marchand
University of Alberta

  1. Labor Market Impacts of States Issuing of Driving Licenses to Undocumented Immigrants By Amuedo-Dorantes, Catalina; Arenas-Arroyo, Esther; Sevilla, Almudena
  2. Technological Unemployment Revisited: Automation in a Search and Matching Framework By Cords, Dario; Prettner, Klaus
  3. Labour market power and the distorting effects of international trade By Mertens, Matthias
  4. What Drives Female Labor Force Participation? Comparable Micro-Level Evidence from Eight Developing and Emerging Economies By Klasen, Stephan; Pieters, Janneke; Santos Silva, Manuel; Ngoc Tu, Le Thi
  5. Subsidizing labor hoarding in recessions: the employment and welfare effects of short time work By Giupponi, Giulia; Landais, Camille
  6. Do digital information technologies help unemployed job seekers find a job? Evidence from the broadband internet expansion in Germany By Gürtzgen, Nicole; Diegmann (né Nolte), André; Pohlan, Laura; van den Berg, Gerard J.
  7. Early counselling of displaced workers - effects of collectively funded job search assistance By Andersson, Josefine
  8. The changing geography of intergenerational mobility By Bell, Brian; Blundell, Jack; Machin, Stephen
  9. Country-Specific Preferences and Employment Rates in Europe By Simone Moriconi; Giovanni Peri; ;
  10. Lump-sum severance grants and the duration of unemployment By Andersson, Josefine
  11. The Deterrent Effect of an Anti-Minaret Vote on Foreigners’ Location Choices By Slotwinski, Michaela; Stutzer, Alois
  12. Under Pressure? Assessing the Roles of Skills and Other Personal Resources for Work-Life Strains By Blunch, Niels-Hugo; Ribar, David C.; Western, Mark
  13. The missing ingredient: Distance - Internal migration and its long-term economic impact in the United States By Viola von Berlepsch; Andrés Rodríguez-Pose
  14. Decomposing Real Wage Changes in the United States By Fernández-Val, Iván; van Vuuren, Aico; Vella, Francis
  15. The unprotecting effects of employment protection: the impact of the 2001 labor reform in Peru By Jaramillo, Miguel
  16. The inverted-U relationship between credit access and productivity growth By Aghion, Philippe; Bergeaud, Antonin; Cette, Gilbert; Lecat, Rémy; Maghin, Hélène
  17. Do Tax Cuts Produce More Einsteins? The Impacts of Financial Incentives vs. Exposure to Innovation on the Supply of Inventors By Alexander M. Bell; Raj Chetty; Xavier Jaravel; Neviana Petkova; John Van Reenen
  18. The impact of minimum wages on wages and employment: evidence from Greece By Georgiadis, Andreas; Kaplanis, Ioannis; Monastiriotis, Vassilis
  19. Regional Migration and Wage Inequality in the West African Economic and Monetary Union By Girsberger, Esther Mirjam; Meango, Romuald; Rapoport, Hillel
  20. Marshallian vs Jacobs Effects: Which One Is Stronger? Evidence for Russia Unemployment Dynamics By Demidova, Olga; Kolyagina, Alena; Pastore, Francesco

  1. By: Amuedo-Dorantes, Catalina (San Diego State University); Arenas-Arroyo, Esther (University of Oxford); Sevilla, Almudena
    Abstract: Twelve U.S. states, plus the District of Columbia, have recently enacted measures granting undocumented immigrants access to driving licenses. We exploit the state and temporal variation in the issuing of state driving licenses to undocumented immigrants to estimate its impact on these population's employment outcomes. Using 2013 through 2017 data from the monthly Current Population Survey and its Outgoing Rotation Groups, we show that likely undocumented women increase their labor supply in response to the availability of driver licenses. Their work propensity rises by 4.2 percentage points, aligning it to that of their male counterparts. In addition, those at work raise their weekly hours of work by 4 percent. Overall, their real hourly wages drop by 3 percent. We find no similar impacts among likely undocumented men –a result consistent with a standard labor supply model predicting a greater response from individuals with a larger elasticity. Additionally, we find no apparent impacts on the labor supply and wages of similarly skilled Hispanic native-born women. At a time when anti-immigrant sentiments are at an all-time high, understanding how these policies impact targeted groups and similarly skilled native populations is crucial for maintaining an informed immigration policy debate.
    Keywords: driver licenses, undocumented immigrants, labor market impacts, United States
    JEL: I38 J15 J22
    Date: 2018–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12049&r=all
  2. By: Cords, Dario; Prettner, Klaus
    Abstract: Will low-skilled workers be replaced by automation? To answer this question, we set up a search and matching model that features two skill types of workers and includes automation capital as an additional production factor. Automation capital is a perfect substitute for low-skilled workers and an imperfect substitute for high-skilled workers. Using this type of model, we show that the accumulation of automation capital decreases the labor market tightness in the low-skilled labor market and increases the labor market tightness in the high-skilled labor market. This leads to a rising unemployment rate and falling wages of low-skilled workers and a falling unemployment rate and rising wages of high-skilled workers. In a cali- bration to German data, we show that one additional industrial robot causes a loss of 1.66 low-skilled manufacturing jobs, whereas the additional robot creates 3.42 high-skilled manufacturing jobs. Thus, overall employment even rises with automation.
    Keywords: unemployment,automation,job search,technological progress,inequality,skill premium
    JEL: C78 J63 J64 O33
    Date: 2019
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:308&r=all
  3. By: Mertens, Matthias
    Abstract: This article examines how trade shocks shape labour market imperfections that create market power in labour markets and prevent an efficient allocation of labour. I develop a framework for measuring such labor market distortions in monetary terms and document large degrees of those distortions in Germany's manufacturing sector. Import competition can only exert labor market disciplining effects when firms rather than workers have labour market power. Otherwise, export demand and import competition shocks tend to fortify existing distortions by amplifying labour market power structures. This diminishes the gains from trade compared to a model with perfectly competitive labour markets.
    Keywords: international trade,market power,labor markets,allocative efficiency
    JEL: D24 F14 F16 J50 L13 L60
    Date: 2019
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:iwhcom:22019&r=all
  4. By: Klasen, Stephan (University of Göttingen); Pieters, Janneke (Wageningen University); Santos Silva, Manuel (University of Göttingen); Ngoc Tu, Le Thi (University of Göttingen)
    Abstract: We investigate the micro-level determinants of labor force participation of urban married women in eight low- and middle-income economies: Bolivia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, South Africa, Tanzania, and Vietnam. In order to understand what drives changes and differences in participation rates since the early 2000s, we build a unified empirical framework that allows for comparative analyses across time and space. We find that the coefficients of women's characteristics differ substantially across countries, and this explains most of the between-country differences in participation rates. In particular, the relationship between a woman's education and her participation in the labor force varies from being positive and linear (Brazil and South Africa) to being U- or J-shaped (India, Jordan, and Indonesia), or a mixture of both (Bolivia, Vietnam, and Tanzania). Overall, the economic, social, and institutional constraints that shape women's labor force participation remain largely country-specific. Nonetheless, rising education levels and declining fertility consistently increased participation rates, while rising household incomes contributed negatively in relatively poorer countries, suggesting that a substantial share of women work out of economic necessity.
    Keywords: female labor force participation, gender, labor markets, development
    JEL: J20 J16 I25 O15
    Date: 2019–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12067&r=all
  5. By: Giupponi, Giulia; Landais, Camille
    Abstract: The Great Recession has seen a revival of interest in policies encouraging labor hoarding by firms. Short time work (STW) policies, which consist in offering subsidies for hours reductions to workers in firms experiencing temporary shocks, are the most emblematic of these policies, and have been used aggressively during the recession. Yet, very little is known about their employment and welfare consequences. This paper leverages unique administrative social security data from Italy and quasiexperimental variation in STW policy rules to offer compelling evidence of the effects of STW on firms' and workers' outcomes, and on reallocation in the labor market. Our results show large and significant negative effects of STW treatment on hours, but large and positive effects on headcount employment. Results also show that employment effects disappear when the program stops, and that STW offers no long term insurance to workers. Finally, we identify the presence of significant negative reallocation effects of STW on employment growth of untreated firms in the same local labor market. We develop a simple conceptual framework to rationalize this empirical evidence, from which we derive a general formula for the optimal STW subsidy that clarifies the welfare trade-offs of STW policies. Calibrating the model to our empirical evidence, we conduct counterfactual policy analysis and show that STW stabilized employment during the Great Recession in Italy, and brought (small) positive welfare gains.
    Keywords: short-time work; employment; reallocation; social insurance; optimal policy
    JEL: H20 J20 J65
    Date: 2018–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:91708&r=all
  6. By: Gürtzgen, Nicole (Institute for Employment Research); Diegmann (né Nolte), André (Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) and Institute for Employment Research (IAB)); Pohlan, Laura (Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) and Institute for Employment Research (IAB)); van den Berg, Gerard J. (University of Bristol, IFAU Uppsala, IZA, ZEW, CEPR and CESifo)
    Abstract: This paper studies effects of the introduction of a new digital mass medium on reemployment of unemployed job seekers. We combine data on high-speed (broadband) internet availability at the local level with German individual register data. We address endogeneity by exploiting technological peculiarities that affected the roll-out of high-speed internet. The results show that highspeed internet improves reemployment rates after the first months in unemployment. This is confirmed by complementary analyses with individual survey data suggesting that internet access increases online job search and the number of job interviews after a fewmonths in unemployment.
    Keywords: Unemployment; online job search; information frictions; matching technology; search channels
    JEL: C26 H40 J64 K42 L96
    Date: 2018–11–30
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2018_021&r=all
  7. By: Andersson, Josefine (IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy)
    Abstract: Employment Security Agreements, which are elements of Swedish collective agreements, offer a unique opportunity to study very early job search counselling of displaced workers. These agreements provide individual job search assistance to workers who are dismissed due to redundancy, often as early as during the period of notice. Compared to traditional labor market policies, the assistance provided is earlier and more responsive to the needs of the individual worker. In this study, I investigate the effects of the individual counseling and job search assistance provided through the Employment Security Agreement for Swedish blue-collar workers on job finding and subsequent job quality. The empirical strategy is based on the rules of eligibility in a regression discontinuity framework. I estimate the effect for workers with short tenure, who are dismissed through mass-layoffs. My results do not suggest that the program has an effect on the probability of becoming unemployed, the duration of unemployment, or income. However, the results indicate that the program has a positive effect on the duration of the next job.
    Keywords: Employment security agreements; collective agreementM; job loss; mass-layoffs; notification; job search assistance; regression discontinuity design
    JEL: J59 J63 J68
    Date: 2018–12–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2018_022&r=all
  8. By: Bell, Brian; Blundell, Jack; Machin, Stephen
    Abstract: Does the importance of your family background on how far you get in adulthood also depend on where you grow up? For many countries, Britain included, a paucity of data has made this a question with very little reliable evidence to answer. To redress this evidence lacuna, we present a new analysis of intergenerational mobility across three cohorts in England and Wales using linked decennial census microdata. As well as testing the robustness of existing survey evidence on mobility trends over time, this large dataset permits analysis to be undertaken at a more geographically disaggregated level than was previously feasible. Evidence is presented on occupational wages, home ownership and education. Our new analysis shows a slight decline in occupation-wage mobility and a substantial decline in home ownership mobility over the late 20th century in England and Wales, while the picture for educational mobility is less clear. Focusing on the most recent cohort, we find marked geographic differences in mobility. We find that occupation-wage mobility is exceptionally high in London, while ex-industrial and mining areas experience the lowest rates of mobility. Areas with low occupation-wage mobility were more likely to vote to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum. Home ownership mobility is negatively correlated with house prices and not correlated with occupation-wage mobility, suggesting that geographical comparisons based on one dimension of mobility need not always align with those based on alternative measures.
    JEL: I2 J62 R23 R31
    Date: 2018–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:91714&r=all
  9. By: Simone Moriconi (IÉSEG School of Management); Giovanni Peri (University of California, Davis); ;
    Abstract: European countries exhibit significant differences in employment rates of adult males. Differences in labor-leisure preferences determined by cultural values that vary across countries, can be responsible for part of these differences. However, differences in labor market institutions, productivity, and skills of the labor force are also crucial factors and likely correlated with preferences. In this paper we use variation among first- and second-generation cross-country European migrants to isolate the effect of culturally transmitted labor-leisure preferences on individual employment rates. If migrants maintain some of their country of origin labor-leisure preferences as they move to different labor market conditions, we can separate the impact of preferences from the effect of other factors. We find that country-specific labor-leisure preferences explain about 24% of the top-bottom variation in employment rates across European countries.
    Keywords: : : Labor-Leisure Preferences, Cultural Transmission, Employment, Europe, Migrants.
    JEL: J22 J61 Z10
    Date: 2019–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ies:wpaper:e201718&r=all
  10. By: Andersson, Josefine (IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy)
    Abstract: The well-known positive relationship between the unemployment benefit level and unemployment duration can be separated into two potential sources; a moral hazard effect, and a liquidity effect pertaining to the increased ability to smooth consumption. The latter is a socially optimal response due to credit and insurance market failures. These two effects are difficult to separate empirically, but the social optimality of an unemployment insurance policy can be evaluated by studying the effect of a non-distortionary lump-sum severance grant on unemployment durations. In this study, I evaluate the effects on unemployment duration and subsequent job quality of a lump-sum severance grant provided to displaced workers, by means of a Swedish collective agreement. I use a regression discontinuity design, based on the strict age requirement to be eligible for the grant. I find that the lump-sum grant has a positive effect on the probability of becoming unemployed and the length of the completed unemployment duration, but no effect on subsequent job quality. My analysis also indicates that spousal income is important for the consumption smoothing abilities of displaced workers, and that the grant may have a greater effect in times of more favorable labor market conditions.
    Keywords: Employment Security Agreements; collective agreement; lump-sum severance grant; unemployment insurance; moral hazard; liquidity effect; regression discontinuity design
    JEL: J59 J63 J65
    Date: 2018–12–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2018_023&r=all
  11. By: Slotwinski, Michaela; Stutzer, Alois
    Abstract: In a national ballot in 2009, Swiss citizens surprisingly approved an amendment to the Swiss constitution to ban the further construction of minarets. The ballot outcome manifested reservations and anti-immigrant attitudes in regions of Switzerland which had previously been hidden. We exploit this fact as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of negative attitudes towards immigrants on foreigners’ location choices and thus indirectly on their utility. Based on a regression discontinuity design with unknown discontinuity points and administrative data on the population of foreigners, we find that the probability of their moving to a municipality which unexpectedly expressed stronger reservations decreases initially by about 40 percent. The effect is accompanied by a drop of housing prices in these municipalities and levels off over a period of about 5 months. Moreover, foreigners in high-skill occupations react relatively more strongly highlighting a tension when countries try to attract well-educated professionals from abroad.
    Keywords: attitudes,foreigners,location choice,popular initiative,regression discontinuity design
    JEL: D83 J61 R23 Z13
    Date: 2019
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:305&r=all
  12. By: Blunch, Niels-Hugo (Washington and Lee University); Ribar, David C. (University of Melbourne); Western, Mark (University of Queensland)
    Abstract: Many working parents struggle to balance the demands of their jobs and family roles. Although we might expect that additional resources would ease work-family constraints, theory and evidence regarding resources have been equivocal. This study uses data on working mothers and fathers – as well as their cohabiting partners/spouses – from the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey to investigate how personal resources in the form of skills, cognitive abilities, and personality traits affect work-life strains. It considers these along with standard measures of economic, social, and personal resources, and estimates seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) models of work-life strains for employed mothers and fathers that account for correlations of the couple's unobserved characteristics. The SUR estimates indicate that computer skills reduce work-life strains for mothers, that math skills reduce strains for fathers, and that the personality traits of extraversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability reduce strains for both parents. However, the estimates also indicate that better performance on a symbol look-up task, which tests attention, visual scanning acuity, and motor speed, increases fathers' work-life strains.
    Keywords: work-family strains and gains, cognitive abilities, skills, household resources, Australia, HILDA survey
    JEL: I1 I31 J24 J81
    Date: 2018–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12055&r=all
  13. By: Viola von Berlepsch; Andrés Rodríguez-Pose
    Abstract: This paper examines if internal migrants at the turn of the 20th century have influenced the long-term economic development of the counties where they settled over 100 years ago. Using Census microdata from 1880 and 1910, the distance travelled by American-born migrants between birthplace and county of residence is examined to assess its relevance for the economic development of US counties today. The settlement patterns of domestic migrants across the 48 continental states are then linked to current county-level development. Factors influencing both migration at the time and the level of development of the county today are controlled for. The results of the analysis underline the economic importance of internal migration. Counties that attracted American-born migrants more than 100 years ago are significantly richer today. Moreover, distance is crucial for the impact of internal migration on long-term economic development; the larger the distance travelled by domestic migrants, the greater the long-term economic impact on the receiving territories.
    Keywords: Internal migration, distance, long-term, economic development, counties, US
    JEL: J61 N11 O15 R23
    Date: 2019–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egu:wpaper:1903&r=all
  14. By: Fernández-Val, Iván (Boston University); van Vuuren, Aico (University of Gothenburg); Vella, Francis (Georgetown University)
    Abstract: We employ CPS data to analyze the sources of hourly real wage changes in the United States for 1976 to 2016 at various quantiles of the wage distribution. We account for the selection bias from the annual hours of work decision by developing and implementing an estimator for nonseparable selection models with censored selection rules. We then decompose wage changes into composition, structural and selection effects. Composition effects have increased wages at all quantiles but the patterns of wage changes are generally determined by the structural effects. Evidence of changes in the selection effects only appear at lower quantiles of the female wage distribution. The combination of these various components produce a substantial increase in wage inequality. This increase has been exacerbated by the changes in females' working hours.
    Keywords: wage inequality, wage decomposition, nonseparable model, selection bias
    JEL: C14 I24 J00
    Date: 2018–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12044&r=all
  15. By: Jaramillo, Miguel
    Abstract: According to the National Household Survey (ENAHO), approximately three out of four employment relationships within the formal sector of the Peruvian economy are based on temporary contracts. This percentage is larger than that of any OECD country and also considerably larger to that of any other country of the Latin American region. This study aims to elucidate the role that the 2001 labor reform played on these results and the effect this has had on variables associated to Peruvian workers’ well-being. To this end, we exploit the information on contract type and start date (identified by the employment duration), which are reported on the household surveys, to analyze the decision between using fixed-term contracts or indefinite-term contracts. The average impact obtained from a differences-in-differences estimation with matching, having workers with contract but with no health insurance as a control group, is a reduction of 41 percent in the probability of having contracts of indefinite duration in the short term (up to five years after the reform), whereas the long-term impact has been a drop by 70 percent. These results are consistent, and similarly large, as those found in a model of simple differences controlling for workers’ characteristics, firms and economic context. The results are robust to placebo tests and estimations by activity sectors and firm size. These results mean that, due to the reform, by 2015 over 900,000 jobs that could have been of indefinite-term were fixed-term contracts instead. Estimates based on Mincer equations suggest that this meant a loss of around 1.5 billion dollars in workers' labor income in 2015. Also, 36,000 workers would have affiliated to a union, had such reform not been implemented. These figures suggest than, instead of increasing workers’ protection, the reform implemented by the Constitutional Court left a large portion of them unprotected.
    Keywords: employment protection,labor reform,impact evaluation
    JEL: K31 J63 C52
    Date: 2019
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:299&r=all
  16. By: Aghion, Philippe; Bergeaud, Antonin; Cette, Gilbert; Lecat, Rémy; Maghin, Hélène
    Abstract: In this paper we identify two counteracting effects of credit access on productivity growth: on the one hand, better access to credit makes it easier for entrepreneurs to innovate; on the other hand, better credit access allows less efficient incumbent firms to remain longer on the market, thereby discouraging entry of new and potentially more efficient innovators. We first develop a simple model of firm dynamics and innovation-base growth with credit constraints, where the above two counteracting effects generate an inverted-U relationship between credit access and productivity growth. Then we test our theory on a comprehensive French manufacturing firm-level dataset. We first show evidence of an inverted-U relationship between credit constraints and productivity growth when we aggregate our data at sectoral level. We then move to firm-level analysis, and show that incumbent firms with easier access to credit experience higher productivity growth, but that they also experienced lower exit rates, particularly the least productive firms among them. To confirm our results, we exploit the 2012 Eurosystem's Additional Credit Claims (ACC) program as a quasiexperiment that generated exogenous extra supply of credits for a subset of incumbent firms.
    Keywords: inverted-u relationship; credit; eurosystem
    JEL: J1 F3 G3
    Date: 2018–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:91711&r=all
  17. By: Alexander M. Bell; Raj Chetty; Xavier Jaravel; Neviana Petkova; John Van Reenen
    Abstract: Many countries provide financial incentives to spur innovation, ranging from tax incentives to research and development grants. In this paper, we study how such financial incentives affect individuals' decisions to pursue careers in innovation. We first present empirical evidence on inventors' career trajectories and income distributions using de-identified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records in the U.S. We find that the private returns to innovation are extremely skewed – with the top 1% of inventors collecting more than 22% of total inventors' income – and are highly correlated with their social impact, as measured by citations. Inventors tend to have their most impactful innovations around age 40 and their incomes rise rapidly just before they have high-impact patents. We then build a stylized model of inventor career choice that matches these facts as well as recent evidence that childhood exposure to innovation plays a critical role in determining whether individuals become inventors. The model predicts that financial incentives, such as top income tax reductions, have limited potential to increase aggregate innovation because they only affect individuals who are exposed to innovation and have no impact on the decisions of star inventors, who matter most for aggregate innovation. Importantly, these results hold regardless of whether the private returns to innovation are known at the time of career choice. In contrast, increasing exposure to innovation (e.g., through mentorship programs) could have substantial impacts on innovation by drawing individuals who produce high-impact inventions into the innovation pipeline. Although we do not present direct evidence supporting these model-based predictions, our results call for a more careful assessment of the impacts of financial incentives and a greater focus on alternative policies to increase the supply of inventors.
    JEL: H0 J0 O3
    Date: 2019–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25493&r=all
  18. By: Georgiadis, Andreas; Kaplanis, Ioannis; Monastiriotis, Vassilis
    Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of minimum wages on wages and employment in Greece between 2009 and 2017. Our main contribution is the examination of the effects of minimum wages under a dramatically changing context, as during this period Greece has experienced the deepest recession in its recent history, extensive labour market reforms, and several changes in the minimum wage, including a large decrease. Employing a unique administrative panel matched employer-employee data set and a range of estimators, such as difference-in-differences, fixed effects, and Instrumental Variables, we find that minimum wages have a positive and significant effect on individual and firm-level wages with significant positive wage spill-overs extending, sometimes, above the median wage, but no systematic employment effects.
    Keywords: minimum wage; wages; employment
    JEL: N0 R14 J01
    Date: 2018–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:91959&r=all
  19. By: Girsberger, Esther Mirjam (University of Technology, Sydney); Meango, Romuald (Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy); Rapoport, Hillel (Paris School of Economics)
    Abstract: We investigate the impact of regional migration on average wages and on wage inequality in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA). We exploit unique data from a unified labour force household survey which covers natives and migrants in the seven economic capitals of the region. We first estimate the counterfactual wage distributions of UEMOA migrants in absence of migration to evaluate the effect of regional migration when the effect of migration is purely compositional (i.e., when wages are treated as exogenous). We find that regional migration increases average wages by 1.8% and entails a decrease in inequality that ranges between -1.5% (for the Gini index) and -4.5% (for the interquartile ratio). This is essentially driven by a reduction in inequality between countries, while the effect of migration on within-country inequality is heterogeneous across countries and remains small overall. Second, when accounting for possible general equilibrium effects of migration on stayers' wages, we find similar to stronger effects on inequality, albeit with a smaller increase in average wages. The later result is due primarily to the fact that we now account for the predominant pattern of migrants' negative to intermediate self-selection, which tends to depress natives' wages at destination while only mildly affecting wages at home. The former result is due to the fact that regional migration in the UEMOA takes place mostly from low-wage to high-wage countries, which in combination with the general equilibrium effects described above, leads to a larger decrease in between-country inequality than in a setting with exogenous wages.
    Keywords: migration, inequality, Gini Index, West Africa
    JEL: F22 J61 O15
    Date: 2018–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12048&r=all
  20. By: Demidova, Olga (NRU HSE, Moscow); Kolyagina, Alena (NRU HSE, Moscow); Pastore, Francesco (Università della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli)
    Abstract: This paper is devoted to the study of diversification and specialization influence on one of the main indicators of Russian labour market, the unemployment growth. The purpose of the work is to find out which effects dominate in the Russian regions, Marshallian or Jacobs, and whether this predominance is stable for different time intervals. The following hypotheses were empirically tested: 1) the dependence of the unemployment rate on the degree of concentration or diversification is non-monotonic due to possible overlapping effects of urbanization and localization; 2) the influence of the degree of concentration or diversification on the level of unemployment depends on the time period. To test these hypotheses nonparametric additive models with spatial effects were used. Both hypotheses found empirical confirmation. It was shown that in Russia, depending on the period, various effects dominated: in 2008-2010, and 2013-2016 Marshallian effects predominated, while in 2010-2013, Jacobs effects dominated.
    Keywords: concentration, diversification, unemployment, spatial effects, nonparametric models
    JEL: J64 L16 L25 L52 R23
    Date: 2018–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12042&r=all

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