Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'labor markets'
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Viewing papers 21 through 26 of 26
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Working PaperSmart Cafe Cities: Testing Human Capital Externalities in the Boston Metropolitan Area
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-24
Existing studies have explored either only one or two of the mechanisms that human capital externalities percolate at only macrogeographic levels. This paper uses the 1990 Massachusetts Census data and tests four mechanisms at the microgeographic levels in the Boston metropolitan area labor market. We propose that individual workers can learn from their occupational and industrial peers in the same local labor market through four channels: depth of human capital stock, Marshallian labor market externalities, Jacobs labor market externalities, and thickness of the local labor market. We find that all types of human capital externalities are significant across Census blocks. Different types of externalities attenuate at different speeds over distances. For example, the effect of human capital depth decays rapidly beyond three miles away from block centroid. We conclude that knowledge spillovers are very localized within microgeographic scope in cities that we call Smart Caf' Cities.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFactor Price Equality and the Economies of the United States
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-21
We develop a methodology for identifying departures from relative factor price equality across regions that is valid under general assumptions about production, markets and factors. Application of this methodology to the United States reveals substantial and increasing deviations in relative skilled wages across labor markets in both 1972 and 1992 . These deviations vary systematically with labor markets' industry structure both in cross section and over time.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Dynamics of Worker Reallocation Within and Across Industries
June 2005
Working Paper Number:
tp-2005-02
This paper uses an integrated employer-employee data set to answer two key questions: 1. What is the "equilibrium" amount of worker reallocation in the economy - both within and across industries? 2. How much does firm-level job reallocation affect the separation probabilities of workers? Consistent with other work, we find that there is a great deal of reallocation in the economy, although this varies substantially across demographic group. Much worker reallocation is within the economy, roughly evenly split between within and across broadly defined industries. An important new finding is that much of this reallocation is confined to a relatively small subset of workers that is shuffled across jobs - both within and across industries - in the economy. However, we also find that even for the most stable group of workers, firm level job reallocation substantially increases the probability of transition for even the most stable group of workers. Finally, workers who are employed in industries that provide low returns to tenure are much more likely to reallocate both within and across industries.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperImmigration, Skill Mix, and the Choice of Technique
May 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-04
Using detailed plant- level data from the 1988 and 1993 Surveys of Manufacturing Technology, this paper examines the impact of skill mix in U.S. local labor markets on the use and adoption of automation technologies in manufacturing. The level of automation differs widely across U.S. metropolitan areas. In both 1988 and 1993, in markets with a higher relative availability of lessskilled labor, comparable plants ' even plants in the same narrow (4-digit SIC) industries ' used systematically less automation. Moreover, between 1988 and 1993 plants in areas experiencing faster less-skilled relative labor supply growth adopted automation technology more slowly, both overall and relative to expectations, and even de-adoption was not uncommon. This relationship is stronger when examining an arguably exogenous component of local less-skilled labor supply derived from historical regional settlement patterns of immigrants from different parts of the world. These results have implications for two long-standing puzzles in economics. First, they potentially explain why research has repeatedly found that immigration has little impact on the wages of competing native-born workers at the local level. It might be that the technologies of local firms'rather than the wages that they offer'respond to changes in local skill mix associated with immigration. A modified two-sector model demonstrates this theoretical possibility. Second, the results raise doubts about the extent to which the spread of new technologies have raised demand for skills, one frequently forwarded hypothesis for the cause of rising wage inequality in the United States. Causality appears to at least partly run in the opposite direction, where skill supply drive s the spread of skill-complementary technology.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAgent Heterogeneity and Learning: An Application to Labor Markets
October 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-20
I develop a matching model with heterogeneous workers, rms, and worker-firm matches, and apply it to longitudinal linked data on employers and employees. Workers vary in their marginal product when employed and their value of leisure when unemployed. Firms vary in their marginal product and cost of maintaining a vacancy. The marginal product of a worker-firm match also depends on a match-specific interaction between worker and rm that I call match quality. Agents have complete information about worker and rm heterogeneity, and symmetric but incomplete information about match quality. They learn its value slowly by observing production outcomes. There are two key results. First, under a Nash bargain, the equilibrium wage is linear in a person-specific component, a firm-specific component, and the posterior mean of beliefs about match quality. Second, in each period the separation decision depends only on the posterior mean of beliefs and person and rm characteristics. These results have several implications for an empirical model of earnings with person and rm e ects. The rst implies that residuals within a worker-firm match are a martingale; the second implies the distribution of earnings is truncated. I test predictions from the matching model using data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the US Census Bureau. I present both xed and mixed model specifications of the equilibrium wage function, taking account of structural aspects implied by the learning process. In the most general specification, earnings residuals have a completely unstructured covariance within a worker-firm match. I estimate and test a variety of more parsimonious error structures, including the martingale structure implied by the learning process. I nd considerable support for the matching model in these data.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Demand for Human Capital: A Microeconomic Approach
December 2001
Working Paper Number:
CES-01-16
We propose a model for explaining the demand for human capital based on a CES production function with human capital as an explicit argument in the function. The resulting factor demand model is tested with data on roughly 6,000 plants from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database. The results show strong complementarity between physical and human capital. Moreover, the complementarity is greater in high than in low technology industries. The results also show that physical capital of more recent vintage is associated with a higher demand for human capital. While the age of a plant as a reflection of learning-by-doing is positively related to the accumulation of human capital, this relation is more pronounced in low technology industries.View Full Paper PDF
