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ABSTRACT The rapid rise of Chinese exports over the past two decades has raised concerns about manufacturing jobs and wage inequality in high-income countries. spillovers beyond the manufacturing sector are an important issue given the large size of the nontraded sector in modern economies as well as the imperfect spatial mobility of households. In this paper, I estimate the impact of Chinese import competition onto the structure of employment and wages of local labor markets in France, with an emphasis on spillovers effects beyond manufacturing and the degree of local wage inequality. Local employment and total labor income in both manufacturing and nonmanufacturing are negatively affected by rising exposure to imports. Import competition from China polarized the local structure of employment in the manufacturing sector. The wage distribution is uniformly negatively affected in manufacturing while the nontraded sector experiences wage polarization, i.e., a rise in upper-tail inequality and a decline in bottom-tail inequality. While overall wage inequality is on average not affected, I show that it increased in response to trade shocks in areas where the minimum wage is only weakly binding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines which types of individuals are attracted to or repelled from rural and urban areas in France. Migration decisions among urban centers, suburbs, and rural areas are examined for three age groups. Differences between locations are assumed to be driven by agglomeration economies and externalities resulting from densities. We therefore stress the role of labor-market size, land markets, and commuting time in migration decisions. The results from multinomial mixed logits show that large labor markets attract the youngest and in particular educated individuals. Larger family size favors migration from city centers to suburbs, whereas divorce and widowhood increase the probability of moving to an urban center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the impact of migration on wages. We introduce a spatial dimension into the job search framework, so that the agent faces neither the same job offer distribution nor the same search costs when looking for a job inside his local labor market. This is in comparison to the agent searching outside his local labor market, where migration costs are a factor. We estimate wage equations in which we introduce the decision to migrate as a binary choice, and later as a polychotomic choice(stayer/mover from provinces to Paris/mover from provinces to provinces). We find no selection effect for people with low levels of education, and a positive selection effect for highly educated migrants. When we distinguish the migration destination for highly educated from provinces, we find a hierarchical effect, that is, the selection effect is higher for men who migrate to Paris than for those who migrate to other provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]