Each year Germany and many other developed economies spend tens of billions of Euros on active measures of employment promotion with the explicit aim of contributing to the reduction of unemployment. Yet, high unemployment has universally been a persistent problem throughout the last two...

This paper contributes to the literature on macroeconometric evaluation of active labour market policies (ALMP) by considering the regional effects on both the matching process and the job-seeker rate. We use an unique new data set on all Austrian job-seekers between 2001 to 2007 and apply GMM...

We propose an integrated framework to discuss the empirical literature on the local determinants of agglomeration effects. We start by presenting the theoretical mechanisms that ground individual and aggregate empirical specifications. We gradually introduce static effects, dynamic effects, and...

This paper provides descriptive evidence about the distribution of wages and skills in denser and less dense employment areas in France. We confirm that on average, workers in denser areas are more skilled. There is also strong over-representation of workers with particularly high and low skills...

The model of compensating differentials in regional labor markets was developed by Roback (1982). The model interprets regional differences in constant quality wages and rents as compensating firms and residents for inter-regional differences in amenities. The model assumes that the costs of...

Rural-urban migrants in China appear to prefer nearby destination cities. To gain a better understanding of this phenomenon, we build a simple model in which migrants from rural areas choose among potential destination cities to maximize utility. The distance between a migrant's home village and...

It is difficult to determine whether ghettos are good or bad, partly because racial segregation may have some effects that are unobservable. To overcome this challenge, we present a migration choice model that allows for estimating the overall effects of racial segregation. The key idea...

This paper provides a simple theory of geographical mobility which simultaneously explains people’s choice of residences in space and the location of industry. Residences are chosen on the basis of the utility which mobile households obtain across locations. The spatial pattern of industry is...

In this paper we survey the recent developments in two empirical literatures at the crossroads of labor and urban economics: Studies about localized human capital externalities (HCE) and about the urban wage premium (UWP). After surveying the methods and main results of each of these two...

A prominent feature of economic geography in America is the positive correlation amongst local incomes, housing costs and city population. This paper embeds a “black box” agglomeration economy within a more neoclassical general equilibrium model of local wages, rents and population to assess...