Explore the vast range of titles available.

Challenging many common perceptions, this is the first book fully dedicated to understanding a major new phenomenon-the large numbers of skilled urban workers who are now coming across the border from Mexico's cities. Based on a ten-year, on-the-ground study of one working-class neighborhood in Monterrey, Mexico's industrial powerhouse and third-largest city,Metropolitan Migrantsexplores the ways in which Mexico's economic restructuring and the industrial modernization of the past three decades have pushed a new flow of migrants toward cities such as Houston, Texas, the global capital of the oil industry. Weaving together rich details of everyday life with a lucid analysis of Mexico's political economy, Rubén Hernández-León deftly traces the effects of restructuring on the lives of the working class, from the national level to the kitchen table.

We investigate the role of skill complementarities in production and mobility across cities. The nature of the complementarities determines the equilibrium skill distribution across cities. With extreme-skill complementarity, the skill distribution has thicker tails in large cities; with top-skill complementarity, there is first-order stochastic dominance. Using wage and housing price data, we find robust evidence of thick tails in large cities: large cities disproportionately attract both high- and low-skilled workers, while average skills are constant across city size. This pattern of spatial sorting is consistent with extreme-skill complementarity, where the productivity of high-skilled workers and of the providers of low-skilled services are mutually enhanced.

We show that the migration of low-skilled, rural workers to urban centers has a negative causal effect on innovation of firms in such urban centers. Our tests exploit the staggered relaxation of city-level household registration system in China, which facilitates rural residents to migrate to cities. We find a significant decrease in innovation for firms headquartered in cities that have adopted such policies relative to firms headquartered in cities that have not. Overall, our results support the view that an abundant supply of low-skilled workers increases the benefit of using existing low-skilled technology and thus reduces firms' incentive to innovate.

The research presented in this paper explores, in the French context, the hypothesis that employment problems experienced by low-skilled jobseekers are partially caused by spatial urban factors. Many low-skilled workers live in poor neighbourhoods where they are exposed to a distressed social environment and/or weak job accessibility.For reasons discussed in this article, living in such neighbourhoods may increase the duration of unemployment for jobseekers. On the basis of an empirical study, this hypothesis is tested in the Paris-Île-de-France metropolitan area and addresses the question: all other things being equal, are low-skilled workers living in high-poverty neighbourhoods and/or neighbourhoods with low job accessibility exposed to a greater risk of long-term unemployment?

We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over specialization, and the falling cost of automating routine, codifiable job tasks. Applying a spatial equilibrium model, we corroborate four implications of this hypothesis. Local labor markets that specialized in routine tasL · differentially adopted information technology, reallocated low-skill labor into service occupations (employment polarization), experienced earnings growth at the tails of the distribution (wage polarization), and received inflows of skilled labor.

This paper investigates the causal effects of the relaxation of internal migration restrictions on labor market outcomes of urban natives in China, exploiting an “entry barrier” hukou reform. The prevalent view of China’s hukou reform emphasizes its attraction for low-skilled workers, neglecting its considerable impact on high-skilled individuals. We find that the hukou reform cities attracted more high-skilled migrants. The greater availability of high-skilled migrants due to the hukou reform did not significantly affect the overall employment and income of urban natives. However, the reform did lead to employment shifts among urban natives, and these effects were most pronounced among high-skilled and medium-skilled urban natives. In addition, we find evidence that the reform attracted more self-employed individuals and private-owned enterprises (POEs), which stimulated local labor demand, especially for high-skilled workers.

The last two decades have witnessed a substantial growth of the owner-occupied housing sector in urban China, where most people tend to follow a conventional life course in terms of ascending the housing ladder towards homeownership. Yet, with skyrocketing housing prices in the real estate market, fragmentation in housing opportunities has become more important in reshaping the structure of social inequalities. This paper investigates the disparities in housing careers between skilled migrants and their local counterparts in Nanjing, focusing on temporal and spatial aspects. Specifically, this paper examines how skilled migrants’ housing tenure and location change over time, to what extent these changes differ from those of skilled locals, and what factors contribute to the disparities between migrants and locals. The results verify that there are indeed disparities in housing careers between migrants and locals, and the foremost difference lies in the tenure, especially the tenure of the first residence. Spatially, migrants exhibit an outward-bound pattern, often associated with the transition from renting to owning. These disparities in housing careers could be primarily attributed not only to the gap of the intergenerational transfer of wealth between migrants and locals, which can be traced back to regional disparities in economic development, but also to the self-selection of migration. While facing skyrocketing housing prices, the timing of making a foray into the housing market is pivotal. This study also revealed the diminishing marginal utility of education that is found in terms of establishing a superior housing career. 过去二十年来，中国城市的自住住房部门大幅增长，大多数人倾向于遵循传统的生活方式，向上提升自己以加入有房一族的行列。然而，随着房地产市场房价飙升，住房机会的分割对于重塑社会不平等结构变得更加重要。本文调查了南京技术工人移民与当地同行之间的住房历程差异，重点是时间和空间方面。具体而言，本文探讨了技术工人移民的住房保有形式和地点随时间的变化情况，这些变化与当地技术工人的差异程度，以及导致移民与当地人之间差异的因素。结果证实，移民与当地人之间的住房历程确实存在差异，最重要的差异在于住房保有形式，尤其是第一个住所的保有形式。在空间上，移民表现出一种向外的模式，通常与从租赁到拥有的过渡有关。住房历程的这些差异的主要原因不仅是移民与当地人之间财富代际转移的差距（这可以追溯到经济发展的地区差异），也可归因于移民的自我选择。在面临暴涨的房价时，进入房地产市场的时机至关重要。这项研究还揭示了在建立住房历程优势方面教育的边际效用递减。

In the international competition for talent, local and national policy makers are keen to better understand the location choices of highly skilled workers in order to design more effective policies geared towards the group’s attraction and retention. In this study, we explain whether and to what extent the local living environment, in particular characteristics at the neighbourhood and urban regional level, affect the residential choices of foreign highly skilled workers. We make use of register data from Statistics Netherlands on the residential locations of all of these migrants who entered the Netherlands between 2000 and 2009. We combine this dataset with data on relevant characteristics at the neighbourhood level as well as with relevant amenities and labour market characteristics at the regional level. We estimate a negative binomial regression model to test which characteristics of neighbourhoods and urban regions are associated with high inflows of foreign highly skilled workers at the neighbourhood level. We find that, besides labour market characteristics, the characteristics of the local environment do matter for location choices of foreign highly skilled workers in the Netherlands. This group tends to settle in higher income, inner city neighbourhoods that offer a high degree of urban vibe. Furthermore, residential choices differ between single and multi-person households and change with duration of stay in the country. 在人才的国际竞争中，地方和国家的政策制定者都热切希望更好地了解高技能人才的地点选择，从而设计出更有效的政策来吸引和留住人才。在本研究中，我们解释了地方居住环境，特别是居住区和城市区域的特点是否影响了外国高技能工人的住址选择。我们利用来自荷兰统计局关于 2000 年至 2009 年间荷兰新增移民居住地点的登记数据。我们将这个数据集与居住区层面的相关特征数据以及地区层面的相关便利设施和劳动力市场特征数据做了结合。我们估算了一个负二项回归模型来测试居住区和城市区域的哪些特征与居住区层面的外国高技能工人大量流入相关联。分析发现，除了劳动力市场特征之外，地方环境特征对于荷兰的外国高技能工人选址很重要。这个群体倾向于定居在拥有高度城市活力的高收入内城居住区。此外，单身家庭和多成员家庭的住宅选择不同，并随着住在国内的时间而改变。

This paper demonstrates that low-skilled Mexican-born immigrants' location choices respond strongly to changes in local labor demand, which helps equalize spatial differences in employment outcomes for low-skilled native workers. We leverage the substantial geographic variation in labor demand during the Great Recession to identify migration responses to local shocks and find that low-skilled Mexican-born immigrants respond much more strongly than low-skilled natives. Further, Mexican mobility reduced the incidence of local demand shocks on natives, such that those living in metro areas with a substantial Mexican-born population experienced a roughly 50 percent weaker relationship between local shocks and local employment probabilities.

We propose an index of population diversity based on people’s birthplaces and decompose it into a size (share of immigrants) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component. We show that birthplace diversity is largely uncorrelated with ethnic, linguistic or genetic diversity and that the diversity of immigrants relates positively to measures of economic prosperity. This holds especially for skilled immigrants in richer countries at intermediate levels of cultural proximity. We address endogeneity by specifying a pseudo-gravity model predicting the size and diversity of immigration. The results are robust across specifications and suggestive of skill-complementarities between immigrants and native workers.