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ABSTRACT Low rates of internal migration in many European countries contribute to the persistence of significant regional labor market differences. I use the Mikrozensus, a large annual sample of households living in Germany, to further our understanding of the underlying reasons. This paper makes two main contributions: first, the paper quantifies the disutility of migrating. To this end, I estimate conditional logit models of the migration decision across the German federal states. Second, I then focus on the differences between immigrants and natives. I find significantly higher responsiveness to labor market differentials in the immigrant population than in the native population. Unobserved moving costs for immigrants are estimated to be only about 31 percent of this same cost for natives. The findings bear on the assessment of the economic impact of immigration, and the paper contributes to the current immigration-related policy debates that feature prominently in many European countries, and that likely will continue to be important in light of the ongoing EU expansion and the resulting east-west migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the role of the business size distribution on income and employment growth in U.S. counties from 1990 to 2000. We measure the business size distribution as the share of employees across nine establishment size categories that range from microfirms (one to four employees) to large firms (1,000+ employees) and using three indices similar to a Gini coefficient. Results show that the business size distribution has a significant impact on county-level growth patterns. Employment shares in small firms increase employment growth, but decrease income growth. One possible conclusion suggests policies emphasizing small firms and entrepreneurship during times of high unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses recent advances in dynamic panel econometrics to examine the impact of highway infrastructure on aggregate county-level employment using data for all 100 North Carolina counties from 1985 through 1997. Results are compared to models that do not take endogeneity of highway investment and dynamics of employment adjustment into account. Fully specified dynamic models are found to give insignificant results compared to these other models. Thus, when these issues are properly modeled, the results show that improvements in highways have no discernible impact on employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common in empirical regional economics to use total employment as an explanatory variable while investigating issues such as the level and distribution of income and migration. This paper argues that sector-specific changes in employment and labor market performance can have different effects on economic growth, the collection of tax revenue, migration, and the level and distribution of household income. As such, it is important to model sectors separately. We find that expansions in employment opportunities for a high-wage sector such as computer manufacturing or bioengineering, a medium-wage sector manufacturing, and the lower-wage sector of retailing have differing economic consequences for a small city. We use a data intensive computable general equilibrium model to obtain these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of state economic development incentives on the growth of 366 Ohio manufacturing and nonmanufacturing establishments that launched major expansions between 1993 and 1995. Growth is measured as the actual employment change that occurred in these establishments and as the employment growth announced when expansions were launched. Empirical findings indicate that incentives have very little (or even a negative) effect on actual growth and they have a substantial positive effect on announced growth. Findings also suggest that establishments that received incentives overestimated their announced employment targets more than establishments that did not receive incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]