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Title: Essays on the Relationship between Migration and Labor Market Skill
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2009
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Abstract: 2009 This dissertation consists of three essays describing relationships between migration behavior and labor market skills. The first essay investigates how the distribution of human capital across local labor markets evolves over time. Using a combination of U.S. data sets, I decompose generation-to-generation changes in local human capital into three factors: the previous generation's human capital, intergenerational transmission of skills from parents in the previous generation to their children, and migration of the children. I find evidence of regression to the mean of local skills at the state level and divergence of local skills at the commuting zone level. Labor market size, climate, local colleges, and taxes affect local skill measures. Skills move from urban to rural labor markets through intergener-ational transmission but from rural to urban labor markets through migration. In the second essay, I assess the effect of schooling on the propensity to migrate. Consistent with a large literature, I document positive correlations between schooling and migration. However, the observed correlation between schooling and migration might reflect mechanisms other than the effect of schooling on the costs or returns to migration. So, I estimate this effect by exploiting schooling variation due to compulsory schooling laws (CSLs). I estimate negative effects of schooling on migration among those with relatively little schooling. Results from CSL policy changes in 1947 and 1957 in the U.K. provide the strongest evidence of
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Authors: Mchenry, Peter Nolen
Institution: Yale University
Department: Economics
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure
Countries: United States