Joan Llull is the recipient of a European Research Council Starting Grant for his project, “Dynamic Modeling of Labor Market Mobility and Human Capital Accumulation.” In this short video, Llull provides a brief overview of the project’s main objectives.
Project abstract
In today’s globalized world, labor mobility is at the core of the political debate and a centerpiece for economic policy. The design of migration policies, such as selective, skill-biased, immigration policies, policies to encourage the integration of immigrants, or ones that facilitate geographical mobility to increase labor market opportunities of disadvantaged workers, requires a good understanding of a more fundamental issue: understanding the role of internal migration and immigration in shaping the career paths and human capital accumulation of workers. This project aims at providing a coherent analysis that allows us to understand the interactions between labor mobility and human capital accumulation, and their implications for economic policy design.
The project takes three different lenses to look at this question:
- Labor mobility as a mechanism for individuals to adjust to labor market policies (e.g. job protection legislation), short run shocks (e.g. the Great Recession), or longer run transformations (e.g. skill-biased technical change)
- The selectivity of the immigration policies (e.g in the United States, H1-B visas versus general immigration visas)
- The human capital accumulation of immigrants themselves (and therefore assimilation and integration)
The type of questions that the project formulates include:
- What are the role of temporary and permanent contracts in shaping career paths and geographic mobility of workers?
- Does the forgone human capital accumulation during a recession produce a lost generation? Is this alleviated by geographical mobility?
- What is the role of geographical and occupational mobility in spreading or containing the effects of technological progress on wage inequality?
- To what extent selective immigration policies maximize native workers’ prospects and wellbeing?
- How can we increase degree of assimilation of immigrants?
See more ERC Grant recipients in the Barcelona GSE research community
