Three essays in labor economics.

Abstract

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters. They examine the labor market response of groups of people when their situation changes. The chapters are common in their methodological focus: all use relatively simple empirical methods but all pay attention to the sources of identification and the effects of measurement error. The title of the first chapter is The Geographic Mobility of Labor and the Rigidity of European Labor Markets. It analyzes regional labor markets in the European Union and the United States. Specifically, it looks at the role of inter-regional migration in the way people adjust to labor demand changes. According to the results, the role of migration in total labor supply responses is significantly weaker in Europe than in the U.S. However, the differences are small for the economically most active cohorts. This suggests that the differences are driven as much by stronger unemployment and nonparticipation responses than weaker migration in Europe. The title of the second chapter is Imported Technology and Increasing Demand for Skill in Middle-Income Countries. The Case of Hungary. It looks at the results and origins of enormous changes in labor demand in a post-communist country. Demand for unskilled labor plummeted in the early years of the transition, while demand for skilled labor increased steadily from the mid-1990's. As supply of skill has been relatively inelastic, the skill premium soared. The results also suggest that imported technology, in a broad sense, plays a major role in the increasing demand for skill. The title of the third chapter is Trade in University Training: Cross-State Variation in the Production and Use of College-Educated Labor. It is a study written with three co-authors: John Bound, Jeffrey Groen, and Sarah Turner. The chapter focuses on how U.S. states can increase the college-educated workforce by increasing the number of students graduating in the state. More specifically, the question of the analysis is how the production of college graduates at the state level affects the stock of college-educated workers in the state. We find at best only a modest link between the production and stock of baccalaureate degree recipients.