Wage Formation, Regional Migration and Local Labour Market Tightness

Abstract

Economic theory predicts that local labour market tightness affects local wage setting as well as individuals' migration decisions. But how should we measure local labour market tightness? In this paper we show that the common practice of using the local rate of unemployment as the tightness indicator may be misplaced. Instead, we propose a human capital adjusted outflow rate from unemployment that can be computed on the basis of micro register data. This outflow rate performs better than traditional measures of regional labour market conditions in panel data analyses of regional wages and interregional migration.