Job Competition and the Wage Curve The wage curve literature consistently finds a negative relationship between regional unemployment rates and regional wages; the most widely accepted theoretical explanations interpret the unemployment rate as a measure of job competition. This paper proposes new ways of measuring job competition, alternative to the unemployment rate, and finds that the negati...

This paper contributes to the literature on temporary migration by developing and solving a model of repeated circular migration that accounts for saving behavior. Using Mexican Migrant Project data on undocumented migrants and non-migrants, I estimate the parameters of the model through the Method of Simulated Moments. The intensity of U.S. border enforcement is found to have a significant pos...

Migration decision-making in developing economies is addressed from the perspective of status in the labor force (unemployed or unemployed) and traditional concerns with utility maximization are expanded to include the role of assets and access to capital markets. A dynamic model is formulated and the results reveal that the migration mechanism is efficient when workers have access to borrowing...

The theoretical framework of urban and regional economics is built on transportation costs for manufactured goods. But over the twentieth century, the costs of moving these goods have declined by over 90% in real terms, and there is little reason to doubt that this decline will continue. Moreover, technological change has eliminated the importance of fixed infrastructure transport (rail and wat...

High levels of immigration to the United States have caused the size of the foreign-born population to increase dramatically in recent years. Recent immigrants are concentrated in several states, particularly California. This paper examines the determinants of the intended state of residence of new recipients of legal permanent-resident status and new refugees over the 1989–94 period. The prese...

We contribute to the literature on effect of taxes locational choices wealthy individuals by examining geographical sensitivity Forbes 400 richest Americans state estate taxes. Though we find billionaires’ effective tax rates are only about half statutory rate, their residential highly sensitive these taxes, as 35 percent local billionaires leave states with an tax. This tax-induced mobility ca...

This paper studies the impact of immigration to United States on vote share for Republican Party using county-level data from 1990 2016. Our main contribution is show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases votes, while inflow low-skilled increases it. These effects are mainly due indirect existing citizens’ and this independent origin country race immigrants. We find political ef...

We study optimal dynamic lockdowns against COVID-19 within a commuting network. Our framework integrates canonical spatial epidemiology and trade models is applied to cities with varying initial viral spread: Seoul, Daegu, the New York City metropolitan area (NYM). Spatial achieve substantially smaller income losses than uniform lockdowns. In NYM Daegu—with large shocks—the lockdown restricts i...

School choice systems aspire to delink residential location and school assignments by allowing children apply schools outside of their neighborhood. However, programs also affect incentives live in certain neighborhoods, this feedback may undermine the goals choice. We investigate possibility developing a model public narrows range between highest lowest quality compared neighborhood assignment...

This paper shows that racial composition shocks during the Great Migration (1940–1970) reduced gains from growing up in northern United States for Black families and can explain 27 percent of region’s upward mobility gap today. I identify share increases by interacting pre-1940 migrants’ location choices with predicted southern county out-migration. Locational changes, not negative selection fa...