JOB CHAINS AND WAGE CURVES: WORKER MOBILITY AND MARSHALLIAN SURPLUSES IN EVALUATING REGIONAL EMPLOYMENT GROWTH*

ABSTRACT In theory, new regional jobs yield two distinct sources of welfare gains to workers: (1) mobility gains achieved by workers as they move up job chains and (2) traditional Marshallian surpluses enjoyed by all workers as labor markets tighten. In the past, we have argued that the second channel is likely to be small relative to the first. This paper integrates a chain model (using PSID job change data) with a modified‐Marshallian model based on “wage curves” (estimated from CPS data) to formalize and test that argument. High wage jobs with modest wage–unemployment elasticities show Marshallian effects only 10 percent to 20 percent the size of mobility effects. Low wage jobs with somewhat higher elasticities show Marshallian effects from 40 percent to 70 percent the size of mobility effects.     

THE PUZZLE OF JOB SEARCH AND HOUSING TENURE: A RECONCILIATION OF THEORY AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Oswald's thesis posits that homeowners should have longer unemployment spells than renters due to restricted mobility, but repeatedly the reverse is found. I contribute to solve this puzzle analyzing both job search intensity and unemployment duration. First, I show that homeowner's mobility constraints have a negative impact on search. Theoretically, it is shown in a search model with moving costs. Using U.K. Labour Force Survey (LFS) data, it is confirmed when considering outright owners, while leveraged owners have the highest search. Second, I find evidence that homeowners select search methods associated with shorter unemployment spells, suggesting that they search more efficiently.     

Settlement Dimensions of the Vietnam-Born Population in Metropolitan Sydney

Australia has the largest Indochinese population per capita in the world, and Sydney supported sizeable populations from Vietnam in 1986. These populations became socially visible because of physical characteristics and clustering and have generated the response by some commentators that ghettos are forming. This paper examines the extent of residential concentration of Vietnamese-bom population in Sydney and changes over time in the distribution of settlement with reference to new immigration and internal migration. Gravitation group migration has reinforced concentration, but the result has not been ghettos, although there have been specific local problems of unemployment and housing access which may constrain residential mobility for some time. Manufacturing and residential restructuring have affected unemployment and have constrained dispersion. Institutional factors have reinforced concentration. Some residential mobility will be required for entry into a diversity of labour markets, if unemployment is to be reduced in the context of the restructuring of manufacturing production.     

THE IMPACT OF SKILL‐SPECIFIC MIGRATION ON REGIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT DISPARITIES IN GERMANY

Differences in regional unemployment are still pronounced in Germany, especially between eastern and western Germany. Although the skill level seems important for the relationship between regional disparities and labor migration, corresponding empirical evidence is scarce. Applying dynamic panel models, we investigate the impact of labor mobility differentiated by educational attainment of the workers on regional unemployment disparities between 2000 and 2008. The impact of low‐ and medium‐skilled migration is consistent with traditional neoclassical reasoning, suggesting that labor mobility reduces differences in regional unemployment rates. In contrast, the migration of high‐skilled workers tends to reinforce disparities.     

SPATIAL HETEROGENEITY AND THE WAGE CURVE REVISITED*

ABSTRACT Most “wage curve” studies ignore the geography of local labor markets. However, when a local labor market is in close proximity of other labor markets, a local shock that increases unemployment may not lead to lower pay rates if employers fear outward migration of their workers. Hence, the unemployment elasticity of pay will be greater, the more isolated the local labor market is. Wages are also expected to be higher in regions that interact strongly with other regions. These hypotheses are confirmed by means of an estimation of wage curves with data for 327 regions of western Germany over the period 1990–1997.     

Navigating Wait Space in Uncertain Times: Young Women and Precarious Labour in Turkey

Despite dramatic increases in university graduates over the last 30 years, unemployment rates among youth with advanced education in Turkey remain some of the highest in the world. With levels of unemployment among university graduates almost equal that of high school graduates, the promise of social mobility and formal waged work that higher education once promised, no longer holds credibility. Many young people, instead find themselves in waithood—a state characterised by uncertainty, joblessness, and obstacles to independent adulthood. Studies tend to view waithood temporally as a period of indeterminacy and frustrated futures, but we argue, waithood also encompasses spatial dimensions that are liberatory in so far as they communicate a demand for a liveable life. Examining how young women in Turkey navigate both the state’s conservative politics, and restricted employment opportunities, we use the term “wait space” to capture what an attentiveness to the intimate connection between space and time and work offers to our understanding of the politics and possibilities of work beyond the wage.     

Cross-border higher education in the Australia–Japan relationship

Over the last three decades there has been a significant increase in higher education student mobility between Australia and Japan and a proliferation of formal exchange agreements between institutions. Yet education issues have not been prominent in the official bilateral relationship and initiatives of substance have been limited. The growing scale of student mobility, despite this, is testimony to the broader strength of the bilateral relationship, a well developed Australia-bound private education services industry, and complementarities between the two education sectors. There is considerable scope for further initiatives, both at the intergovernmental and educational institution levels, to capitalise on established bilateral patterns of individual student mobility. Australia–Japan higher education linkages remain incommensurate with the scale, complexity and importance of the broader economic and political partnership. Australia and Japan, as leading study abroad destinations in the region and with internationally mobile populations, can do more to enhance the public and private institutional architecture of cross-border education, both within and beyond the Asia–Pacific region.     

Resettlement in Lao PDR: mobility,resistance and gendered impacts

Villagers in northern Laos have been on the move for generations. Recent changes, however, in the location of their village and their daily mobility patterns differ from what they have experienced before; the government's resettlement programme has changed their livelihoods and made them more socially and economically vulnerable. The ethnic groups we studied have decided to use mobility to resist state control and seek livelihood security for themselves. By using the concept of motility, this article analyses how this household and community choices have a gender-differentiated impact. The mobility patterns of men and women have changed. While men attend to long-term investments, women are forced to make ends meet on a day-to-day basis. Men visit the market and public places more frequently, while women spend more time looking for non-timber forest products and working as hired labour. Although women now support the family and their mobility has increased, their say in the household seems to be on the decline, resulting in weakening women's motility.     

Nationalism,ethnic conflict,and job competition: non‐Russian collective action in the USSR under perestroika†

ABSTRACT. The article examines the effects of job competition on ethnic relations within a multinational state. It argues that demographic increase leads to competition for blue‐collar jobs while an increase in the number of graduates from higher education leads to competition over elite jobs. In the first case, people risk unemployment, in the second, blocked career opportunities. Mass‐level unemployment may lead to anger‐driven mass riots, while an intelligentsia will formulate more rational strategies to eliminate threatening competitors from the labour market. One such strategy is to insist that the state ought to be a national state, in which the national elites will be in control. While questions of identity no doubt also may have an enormously mobilising power in times of national resurgence, identity issues are normally intimately intertwined with interest politics. These mechanisms are traced in the history of ethnic mobilisation in the Soviet Union and the post‐Soviet states during and after perestroika.     

RURAL–URBAN MIGRATION AND UNEMPLOYMENT: THEORY AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS*

ABSTRACT We develop a regional model where, in the city, unemployment prevails because of too high (efficiency) wages, while, in the rural area, workers are paid at their marginal productivity. We characterize the steady‐state equilibrium and show that it is unique. We then consider two policies: decreasing urban unemployment benefits and subsidizing urban employment. We find that decreasing the unemployment benefit in the city creates urban jobs and reduces rural–urban migration since new migrants have to spend some time unemployed before they can find a job in the city. On the other hand, raising employment subsidies increases urban employment but may also increase urban unemployment because it triggers more rural–urban migration. In this respect, the employment subsidy policy can backfire by raising rather than reducing urban unemployment.     

International mobility of women in science and technology careers: shaping plans for personal and professional purposes

International mobility has become a key requirement in science and technology (S&T) professional career progression. On the one hand, the increasing mobility of women suggests that this may be a way for them to avoid or get away from women-unfriendly working environments. On the other hand, international mobility can present problems for women as they, particularly, have to plan their lives around their professional goals and personal lives. This article addresses the international mobility strategies of women regarding their personal and professional choices. We analyse their motivations to move, the way they manage their lives abroad and the effects of mobility on their lives. The analysis is based on 24 in-depth interviews of highly skilled women working in Spanish S&T sectors. Our main findings show that mobility is a new challenge which may improve women's family lives and professional careers. However, they have to plan carefully their lives on a long-term as well as a daily basis. In this sense, they need strong personal determination and the ability to balance their professional and personal goals. Moreover, their personal decisions depend not only on them as individuals, but also on their partners and families, on wider social values, on the institutional support they enjoy, and on the general public policies which they are affected by.     

Opportunities and competition in thick labor markets: Evidence from plant closures

Since Marshall (1890), it has been widely held in urban economic theory that cities insure workers against the risk of unemployment by offering a larger pool of potential jobs. Using a large administrative panel data set on workers displaced as a result of plant closures, we examine whether positive effects from a higher urban job density are offset by more intense competition between workers. When controlling for the sorting of workers between regions, we find robust evidence that the effect of job competition on unemployment duration exceeds that of job opportunities in absolute value. Our results put the idea of urban risk-sharing into perspective and provide an explanation for observed longer unemployment durations in cities.     

Teaching English in South Korea: mobility norms and higher education outcomes in youth migration

In many Western contexts, travel has a long historical association with youth, young adults and coming of age, an association that often connects temporary mobility with the lives of the educated middle classes and elite. Indeed, from the colonial adventure and the ‘grand tour’, to contemporary ideas of the ‘gap year’ or ‘overseas experience’, the mobility of Western youth and young adults is often considered voluntary and based on a desire to explore places and develop positive personal attributes, marking a stark contrast to depictions of migration from the developing world as directly or indirectly forced and driven primarily by economic considerations. This paper questions this depiction of developed world mobility in the context of the changing economic conditions that face young graduates in many Western countries. Drawing on survey and interview data I focus on the profiles and biographies of young adults from English-speaking countries working as foreign language instructors in South Korea. Although the personal narrative of travel and exploration amongst these individuals remains significant, findings from this research also suggest that many of these young graduates are also driven by economic circumstances: unemployment or underemployment and high levels of debt usually associated with tertiary studies. This tension between the opportunities available to young people and the constraints imposed by their own circumstances raises important questions about the multiple layers of social and economic differentiation operating through higher education and international mobility in the lives of young people.     

PERSISTENCE OF REGIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT: APPLICATION OF A SPATIAL FILTERING APPROACH TO LOCAL LABOR MARKETS IN GERMANY*

ABSTRACT The geographical distribution and persistence of regional/local unemployment rates in heterogeneous economies (such as Germany) have been, in recent years, the subject of various theoretical and empirical studies. Several researchers have shown an interest in analyzing the dynamic adjustment processes of unemployment and the average degree of dependence of the current unemployment rates or gross domestic product from the ones observed in the past. In this paper, we present a new econometric approach to the study of regional unemployment persistence, in order to account for spatial heterogeneity and/or spatial autocorrelation in both the levels and the dynamics of unemployment. First, we propose an econometric procedure suggesting the use of spatial filtering techniques as a substitute for fixed effects in a panel estimation framework. The spatial filter computed here is a proxy for spatially distributed region‐specific information (e.g., the endowment of natural resources, or the size of the “home market”) that is usually incorporated in the fixed effects coefficients. The advantages of our proposed procedure are that the spatial filter, by incorporating region‐specific information that generates spatial autocorrelation, frees up degrees of freedom, simultaneously corrects for time‐stable spatial autocorrelation in the residuals, and provides insights about the spatial patterns in regional adjustment processes. We present several experiments in order to investigate the spatial pattern of the heterogeneous autoregressive coefficients estimated for unemployment data for German NUTS‐3 regions. We find widely heterogeneous but generally high persistence in regional unemployment rates.     

Surviving through movement: the mobility of urban youth in Ghana

In Africa, young people are engaging with a globalised world of flows and movements but are coming of age in environments characterised by uncertainty, economic hardship and unemployment. Drawing upon research conducted in Madina, a suburb of Accra, a social navigation perspective is adopted to explore young people's everyday mobility and their aspirations for future mobility. By drawing attention to the meanings young people ascribe to movement, and by analysing their movements as tactics of social navigation, the importance of spatial mobility to young people's everyday well-being and their processes of social becoming are illustrated. Young people find that their mobility is bounded by a range of factors including labour market characteristics, gender and generational relations, and their spatial location on the outskirts of the city and the margins of the world. However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial imagination is restricted to Madina; real or imagined travel takes them to other parts of the city, into rural areas and across the nation's borders. Through illustrating how significant mobility can be for everyday survival, this paper contributes to ‘the mobility turn’ in the social sciences which has overlooked the importance of mobility for livelihoods in the global South.     

International student mobility: the role of social networks

Building upon recent work on higher education mobility, this paper contends that social networks of friendship and kinship are critical determinants for students deciding to study overseas, not just, as has hitherto been suggested, a complementary factor. It uses original data collected through interviews and focus groups with thirty-eight higher education international students studying at three UK universities and argues that students who choose to study overseas do not operate within a vacuum but rather draw upon extended networks of individuals who have chosen to do so themselves or advocate studying abroad. While this encouragement may be of an explicit and unequivocal nature – telling students that they ought to study overseas – for the majority it is rather more implicit. The students interviewed invariably related that higher education overseas or mobility more generally was an accepted practice among their peers, thereby leading to a normalisation of the mobility process. The paper concludes that international students come to accept mobility as a taken for granted stage within the life course, and, whether intentionally or not, this is often the driving force behind their decision to study overseas.     

INHABITING NEW LANDSCAPES: SETTLEMENT AND MOBILITY IN BRITAIN AFTER THE LAST GLACIAL MAXIMUM

Summary.   This paper explores the debate over the reoccupation of northern Europe after the last glacial maximum. Previous contributions to this debate have focused more on the timing of this event, rather than the technological and mobility strategies that enabled people to move into new landscapes. It is argued that a more detailed examination of the archaeological evidence from specific sites can provide a more nuanced understanding of these issues and can highlight the variety of technical economies employed in the late glacial. These concerns are explored through a case study from the Vale of Pickering in northern England.     

MIGRATION OF THE HIGHLY EDUCATED: EVIDENCE FROM RESIDENCE SPELLS OF UNIVERSITY GRADUATES*

ABSTRACT We examine the inter‐regional migration of university graduates from 1991 to 2003 in Finland. The results show that time matters: two‐years before and during the graduation year the hazard rates of migration increase, and then decrease thereafter. Although university graduates are particularly mobile, we find that most of them do not move from their region of studies within 10 years after graduation. The out‐migration, i.e., brain drain, is much higher among graduates in the more peripheral universities than in the growth centers (Helsinki in particular). Migration is also substantially more likely for those studying away from the home region than for those studying at home.     

Hunter–gatherer movement patterns: Causes and constraints

The study of hunter–gatherer mobility patterns is of vital importance to our understanding of the paleolithic archeological record. Such patterns necessarily comprise many interacting locales, and it is at the landscape scale that we should attempt to understand the relationship between ethnographic and archeological data. This paper derives, quantifies and tests a series of basic predictions about the effects of group size, occupation duration and habitat quality on mobility strategies using a substantial ethnographic dataset. The results demonstrate that habitat quality is the best determinant of move distances among hunter–gatherers, but that occupation duration also has an effect among those foragers who rely principally on hunting. It is suggested that three roughly concentric zones, the limit of scatter, the foraging radius, and the logistic radius, are predicted by group size and occupation duration, habitat quality, and proportions of hunting and logistical mobility, respectively. The relevance of these conclusions to more generic ecological theory is discussed in the context of evolutionary forces acting on hunter–gatherer mobility in prehistory.     

Hunter–gatherer responses to environmental change during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition in the southern North Sea basin: Final Palaeolithic–Final Mesolithic land use in northwest Belgium

Situated along the southern fringe of the North Sea basin, northwest Belgium holds great potential for understanding hunter–gatherer responses to environmental change at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition. Recent intensive fieldwork has yielded valuable data on the palaeoenvironment, chronology, and hunter–gatherer mobility and land use in this region. At the Late Glacial/Early Holocene transition this region was comprised of a landscape of coversand ridges and lakes that flanked the northern part of the Scheldt river basin. This landscape was highly productive for hunter–gatherer populations. As the landscape developed in response to the increasing water table caused by the inundation of the North Sea populations responded by changing their forms of mobility and land use. These changes are indicated by the reduction in the number and density of sites, as well as their geographical settings, from the Late Glacial (Federmesser) and Early Mesolithic to the Middle-Final Mesolithic. Late Glacial/Early Mesolithic sites indicate much higher mobility comprised of rapid displacements of camps and re-occupation of the same coversand ridges over long time-spans. Middle/Late Mesolithic sites indicate a reduction in mobility, increasing focus on prolonged riverside settlement, and a more rigid organization of residential sites.