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Abstract
Arntz M., Gregory T. and Lehmer F. Can regional employment disparities explain the allocation of human capital across space, Regional Studies. This paper examines the determinants of skill-selective regional migration in a context where modelling the migration decision as a wage-maximizing process may be insufficient due to persistent employment disparities. Based on a Borjas-type framework it is shown that high-skilled workers are disproportionately attracted to regions with higher mean wages and employment chances as well as higher regional wage and employment inequalities. Estimates from a labour flow fixed-effects model and a general methods of moments (GMM) estimator show that these predictions hold, but only employment disparities induce a robust and significant skill sorting. The paper thus establishes a missing link about why employment disparities may actually be self-reinforcing.
Arntz M., Gregory T. and Lehmer F. 区域就业落差是否能解释人力资源的空间配置，区域研究。将迁徙的决定，模式化为薪资最大化的过程，可能会因为持续性的就业落差而显得不够充分。本文便在此脉络中，检视技术偏好的区域迁徙的决定因素。根据波尔雅斯（Borjas）类型的架构显示，高级技术工作者不成比例地被吸引至拥有较高平均薪资及就业机会、以及拥有较高区域薪资与就业不均等的区域。劳工流动的固定效应模型之评估，以及一般动差法(GMM)的评估显示，这些预估仍然持续着，但儘有就业落差导致坚实且显着的技术区分。本文因而在就业落差为何可能实际上是自我强化方面，建立被遗漏的环节。
Arntz M., Gregory T. et Lehmer F. Les disparités en matière d'emploi régional, expliquent-t-elles la distribution du capital humain à travers l'espace, Regional Studies. Dans un cadre où la modélisation de la décision de migrer comme un processus qui maximise les salaires pourrait s'avérer insuffisante à cause de profondes disparités en matière d'emploi, cet article examine les déterminants de la migration sélective en fonction des compétences requises. À partir d'un cadre du type Borjas, on montre que les travailleurs hautement qualifiés sont attirés de façon disproportionnée vers les régions où les salaires moyens sont plus élevés et sont dotées de meilleures possibilités d'emplois, ainsi que de plus grandes inégalités dans les salaires et l'emploi régionaux. Des estimations provenant d'un modèle à effets fixes des flux de main-d'oeuvre et un estimateur de la méthode des moments généralisée montrent que ces prévisions sont valables, mais ce sont seulement les disparités en matière d'emploi qui entraînent un important triage robuste des compétences. Ainsi, l'article établit un chaînon manquant concernant les raisons pour lesquelles les disparités en matière d'emploi pourraient en effet se renforcer.
Arntz M., Gregory T. und Lehmer F. Können regionale Ungleichheiten im Beschäftigungsniveau die räumliche Allokation von Humankapital erklären?, Regional Studies. In diesem Beitrag untersuchen die Autoren die Determinanten bildungsselektiver Arbeitskräftemigration in einem Kontext rigider Löhne und ausgeprägten Beschäftigungsunterschieden. In einer solchen Situation ist die Modellierung der Migrationsentscheidung als reines Lohn-Maximierungsproblem unzureichend. Im Rahmen von Schätzungen eines erweiterten Borjas-Modells zeigen die Autoren, dass Regionen eine umso qualifiziertere Zuwanderung erfahren, je höher sowohl das regionale Lohn- und Beschäftigungsniveau als auch die Lohn- und Beschäftigungsungleichheit sind. Robustheitsanalysen mit Fixen Effekten für jeden Bruttomigrationsstrom und Schätzungen mit der verallgemeinerten Momentenmethode (GMM) bestätigen die Ergebnisse, zeigen sich jedoch nur für die Beschäftigungsunterschiede robust und signifikant. Die Resultate legen nahe, dass die räumliche Allokation von Humankapital somit stärker über die Beschäftigungsseite determiniert wird. Dieser Beitrag liefert somit einen wichtigen Beitrag zu der Frage warum sich regionale Ungleichheiten möglicherweise selbst verstärken können.
Arntz M., Gregory T. y Lehmer F. ¿Pueden las desigualdades laborales regionales explicar la distribución espacial del capital humano?, Regional Studies. En este artículo analizamos los determinantes de la migración regional seleccionada por cualificaciones en un contexto donde modelar la decisión de emigrar como un proceso para maximizar salarios podría ser insuficiente debido a las persistentes desigualdades de empleo. Basándonos en un esquema tipo Borjas, mostramos que los trabajadores altamente cualificados son atraídos desproporcionadamente a regiones con salarios medios y oportunidades laborales más altos así como desigualdades más altas de salarios y empleo. Según los cálculos de un modelo de efectos fijos de flujos laborales y el cálculo del método generalizado de momentos (GMM) mostramos que estas predicciones se cumplen, pero solamente las desigualdades de empleo llevan a organizar las habilidades de una forma sólida y significativa. De esta manera encontramos el eslabón perdido que explica por qué las desigualdades laborales podrían en realidad autopotenciarse.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the scholars at: the Annual Congress of the German Economic Association (VfS), the 51st Annual Congress of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI), the 25th Annual Conference of the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE), the 4th Summer Conference in Regional Science of the German-speaking section of the RSAI, the 3rd World Conference on Economic Geography, the NORFACE Migration Network Conference, the 3rd Central European Conference in Regional Science (CERS), the 3rd Workshop on Geographical Localisation, Intersectoral Reallocation of Labour and Unemployment Differentials (GRUNLAB), the 6th international workshop on ‘Flexibility in Heterogeneous Labour Markets’ of the German Research Foundation (DFG), as well as seminar participants at ZEW Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Regensburg University and especially Stephan Dlugosz for helpful comments. All remaining errors are the authors’ sole responsibility.
Funding
The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through research project ‘Potentials for the Flexibization of Regional Labour Markets. An Empirical Study on the Consequences of Regional Mobility’.
Notes
1. The Borjas hypothesis has also been tested for international migration. In particular, Borjas (Citation1991, Citation1987) provides empirical evidence in favour of the Borjas Self-Selection Model, assuming migration to be mostly driven by interregional wage differentials. The results have been challenged by Chiswick (Citation1999) and Chiquiar and Hanson (Citation2005) who suggest that migration costs are likely to be inversely related to earnings, thus leading to different outcomes for immigrant selectivity. For a recent overview and discussion of the literature, see Bodvarsson and van den Berg (Citation2013).
2. Their framework is linked to the self-selection of workers, as described by Roy (Citation1951), and its extension to the self-selection of immigrants, as developed by Borjas (Citation1987).
3. While this assumption may be unproblematic within Western and Eastern Germany, it is less clear whether the assumption can be applied to migration across the former German border. Some sensitivity analyses will thus be run in the sixth section.
4. The present empirical approach controls for time-constant regional differentials and, thus, takes account of much of these factors.
5. Although it might seem unlikely that individuals take account of such abstract measures in their utility maximization, it is argued that individuals gather such information when looking for employment and better jobs across regions. Since individuals mainly move after finding a better job match, migration depends on the chances of getting attractive job offers from a particular region, a probability that can be explicitly modelled in the context of a search model (for an example, see Damm and Rosholm, Citation2010). Moreover, search models allow for a simultaneous search across different labour markets and are thus able to explain moves to regions that within a utility framework are suboptimal. Applying a search model would thus be an interesting extension. It was still decided to stick to the simpler utility-maximizing framework because aggregate flows are modelled for which the utility-maximizing framework gives comparable predictions with regard to wages and employment.
6. Note that, analogous to Borjas et al. (Citation1992), relative prices of all skills are assumed to be region invariant so that one does not have to operate with a multifactor model of ability.
7. In Germany, individual taxes are mainly invariant across regions apart from a minor tax for church affiliation. The framework thus abstracts from taxes.
8. Men attending military or civilian service are further excluded since they are centrally registered so that the identification of their exact location is not possible, and apprentices and all employment spells with minor employment are neglected since its definition changed in 1999.
9. Details on the algorithm are available from the authors upon request.
10. Ideally, individuals would be ranked in the income distribution. However, the income distribution for the full BeH data could not be estimated because the data are reduced to a cross-section that lacks information on the previous employment history. Extending the data to include the full employment history is impossible due to the resulting size of the data.
11. Unfortunately, around 15% of all wages are top-coded at the contribution limit of the social security. Therefore, the censored wages are imputed with an estimation procedure described by Gartner (Citation2005). This procedure adds a randomly drawn error term to the predicted wage level and, thereby, avoids a strong correlation between the error term and the explanatory variables.
12. Ideally, the skills used by each individual would be observed. On the other hand, including occupation and industry dummies in addition to establishment size should allow the skill content to be captured quite precisely although the types of skills that are rewarded in the labour market could not be explicitly pinpointed, as has been done by Bacolod et al. (Citation2009) and Florida et al. (Citation2012).
13. The selection of high-skilled individuals into labour markets that best reward their skills as is predicted by the theoretical framework may give rise to an upward bias in the returns to skills, as has been shown by Dahl (Citation2002). For this reason, Dahl used bias-corrected returns to skills in an estimation of skill-selective migration. Despite the upward bias in the returns to skills, however, estimation results for the migration model with uncorrected and corrected returns to skills yielded very similar results, which presumably reflects their high positive correlation. No attempt was made to correct the estimated returns, especially since transferring the methodology proposed by Dahl is not straightforward in a context where polychotomous choices were repeated across a ten-year period.
14. For the definition of unemployment one needs to deal with gaps in the employment record, whenever an individual is out of the labour force, self-employed, a civil servant or unemployed without any receipt of unemployment transfers. For this, following Fitzenberger and Wilke (Citation2010), non-employment periods can be counted only as unemployment if there has been at least one initial receipt of unemployment benefits.
15. Equation (11) was also estimated using absolute migration as a dependent variable in order to test whether the specification replicates migration patterns that have been found in the literature. As expected, it was found that increasing mean wages and mean employment chances in the receiving relative to the sending region raises gross migration levels. Moreover, consistent with similar studies on internal migration, employment differentials have a stronger impact than wage differentials (Puhani, Citation2001; Ederveen et al., Citation2007; McCormick, Citation1997). For studies on the particular German case, see Parikh and Leuvensteijn (Citation2003) and Decressin (Citation1994).
16. Since the log migration rate is used for the estimations, a 1 is added to the numerator in order to avoid missing for year-flow observations with zero migrants.
17. The model is also estimated with the system GMM estimator proposed by Blundell and Bond (Citation1998). Since the Sargan–Hansen test was rejected in most of the system GMM estimations, the results for the difference GMM estimator are only presented.
18. The Sargan–Hansen test on the joint validity of the instruments failed to pass the test for lags dated prior to t – 6.