Archive for November, 2010

Labor mobility

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

If labor was perfectly mobile and suddenly there were massive dislocations requiring workers to relocate, you’d expect an uptick in the number of workers moving, right? A corollary is that if you do not see an up-tick in the number of workers moving, then either there was no massive dislocations or there is not perfectly mobility. Take the second case: with imperfect immobility workers would like to take jobs in other places, but they can’t. This looks like sticky wages. Sticky wages make aggregate demand effects important. These data suggesting labor mobility did not increase in the last recession, then, are consistent with both structural and cyclical problems in the labor market.

Posted in evidence, labor | 9 Comments »

A link everyone will find useful

Monday, November 8th, 2010

I was at a practice job talk at a nearby university on Friday. As preface to my work1, I pointed out that workers change careers many times, 3 or 4 times, over their lifetimes where career change is defined as an occupation change that requires different tasks performed on the job, e.g. taxi driver to nurses assistant. BTW, workers change occupations about once every five years so only about a third of these are career changes. One of the audience members, an academic, objected saying that nobody he knows has ever changed occupations (not just careers, occupations).

On that note, I am sure everyone would find this MR linked paper useful: goofy titles get cited less often. At the link, its suggested that this is because “science is serious business”, but in my experience this result stems from the fact that most of these titles are “funny” but not funny. The problem is that the paper only looks at the effect of average “funny” titles. Since the average “funny” title isn’t funny, just “funny”, its picking up the effect of being “funny” not funny. I’m sure there are some really funny titles that get extra cites because of it.

Which paper titles are funny and not just “funny”?

  1. I’ll post on it as soon as I get my job applications sent [↩]

Posted in evidence, labor, method, uc davis econ | 2 Comments »