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Labor mobility is the flexibility of workers to walk away from an industry in response to better opportunities. I develop a model in which labor flows make bad times worse for shareholders who are left with capital that is less productive. The model shows that firms face greater operating leverage by providing flexibility to mobile workers. I construct an empirical measure of labor mobility consistent with the model and document an economically significant cross-sectional relation between mobility, operating leverage, and stock returns. I find that firms in mobile industries earn returns over 5% higher than those in less mobile industries.

We study the evolution of trade liberalization's effects on Brazilian local labor markets. Regions facing larger tariff cuts experienced prolonged declines informal sector employment and earnings relative to other regions. The impact of tariff changes on regional earnings 20 years after liberalization was three times the effect after 10 years. These increasing effects on regional earnings are inconsistent with conventional spatial equilibrium models, which predict declining effects due to spatial arbitrage. We investigate potential mechanisms, finding empirical support for a mechanism involving imperfect interregional labor mobility and dynamics in labor demand, driven by slow capital adjustment and agglomeration economies. This mechanism gradually amplifies the effects of liberalization, explaining the slow adjustment path of regional earnings and quantitatively accounting for the magnitude of the long-run effects.

This study evaluates how authorization status shapes job transitions among Mexican and Central American immigrants in the United States. Specifically, using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we impute legal status and track employment histories for authorized and unauthorized workers, as well as native-born counterparts, in the less skilled labor market. We distinguish job moves based on changes in occupations and employers; and by linking workers’ jobs to expected wages in their occupations, we are able to determine whether job transitions result in occupational upgrades or downgrades. Results reveal that unauthorized immigrants have lower adjusted rates of job mobility, consistent with arguments that their lack of work authorization “traps” their employment. Moreover, when unauthorized migrants do change jobs, their transitions are characterized by a process of occupational churning in which they cycle between similarly positioned jobs and have low rates of upward mobility, both within and across firms. We also test the possibility that the wage returns to job mobility are conditioned by legal status. Finally, we find that the penalties to job mobility associated with unauthorized status are more severe for women than men, potentially because of their high levels of segregation in socially isolating jobs.

A term specifically found in European politics, social concertation refers to cooperation between trade unions, governments and employers in public policy-making.Social Concertation in Times of Austerityinvestigates the political underpinnings of social concertation in the context of European integration. Alexandre Afonso focuses on the regulation of labor mobility and unemployment protection in Austria and Switzerland, two of Europe's most prosperous countries, and he looks at nonpartisan policymaking as a strategy for compromise. With this smart, new study, Afonso powerfully enters the debate on the need for a shared social agenda in post-crisis Western Europe.

This paper examines the role of migration networks in determining self-selection patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration. A simple theoretical framework shows the impact of networks on migration incentives at different education levels and how this affects the composition of migrant skills. Empirically, we find positive or education-neutral selection in communities with weak migrant networks but negative self-selection in communities with stronger networks. This is consistent with high migration costs driving positive or intermediate self-selection, as advocated by Chiquiar and Hanson (2005), and with negative self-selection being driven by lower returns to education in the United States than in Mexico, as advocated by Borjas (1987).

Introducing the Knowledge Spillover Theory of Intrapreneurship, we examine how labour mobility impacts innovation distributed by firm size. A matched employer-employee dataset, pooled with firm-level patent application data, is implemented in the analysis. We provide new evidence that knowledge workers' mobility has a positive and strongly significant impact on all firms' innovation output, measured as patent applications. The patterns and effects do however differ between large and small firms. More precisely, for small firms, intraregional mobility of knowledge workers who have previously worked in a patenting firm (the learning-by-hiring effect) is shown to be statistically and economically highly significant, whereas only limited impact could be detected for firms losing knowledge workers (the learning-by-diaspora effect).

We present new evidence on the evolution of labor mobility in the United States over the past four decades. Building on the seminal methodology by Blanchard and Katz (1992), combined with multiple sources of regional population and migration data, we show that interstate mobility in response to relative labor demand conditions is not as high as previously established and has been weakening since the early 1990s. In addition, we find that mobility is countercyclical: net migration across regions responds more strongly to spatial disparities in recessions than in normal times. While the declining trend in mobility has been driven by weaker out-migration from states experiencing negative relative shocks, the mobility surge in recessions is mostly accounted for by temporarily stronger in-migration to better-performing states.

We investigate the effect of studying abroad on international labour market mobility later in life for university graduates. We exploit the introduction and expansion of the European ERASMUS student exchange programme as an instrument for studying abroad. We find that studying abroad increases an individual's probability of working in a foreign country by about 15 percentage points. We investigate heterogeneity in returns according to parental education and the student's financial situation. Furthermore, we suggest mechanisms through which the effect of studying abroad may operate.

State regulation of labour migration is confronted with a double paradox. First, while markets require a policy of open borders to fulfill demands for migrant workers, the boundaries of citizenship impose some degree of closure to the outside. Second, while the exclusivity of citizenship requires closed membership, civil and human rights undermine the state's capacity to exclude foreigners once they are in the country. By considering how Malaysia and Spain have responded to the demand for foreign labour, this book analyses what may be identified as the trilemma between markets, citizenship and rights. For though their markets are similar, the two countries have different approaches to citizenship and rights. We must thus ask: how do such divergences affect state responses to market demands and how, in turn, do state regulations impact labour migration flows? And what does this mean for contemporary migration overall? This title is available in the OAPEN Library - http://www.oapen.org.

Although knowledge flows create value, the market often does not price them accordingly. We examine \"unintended\" knowledge flows that result from the cross-border movement of inventors (i.e., flows that result from the move, but do not go to the hiring firm). We find that the inventor's new country gains from her arrival above and beyond the knowledge flow benefits enjoyed by the firm that recruited her (National Learning by Immigration). Furthermore, the firm that lost the inventor also gains by receiving increased knowledge flows from that individual's new country and firm (Firm Learning from the Diaspora). Surprisingly, the latter effect is only twice as strong when the mover moves within the same multinational firm, suggesting that knowledge flows between inventors do not necessarily follow organizational boundaries, thus creating opportunities for public policy and firm strategy.