Three Essays in Labor Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays in empirical labor economics. All essays analyze current issues in European labor markets. The first chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of labor-market evolutions in towns and rural areas from 1970 onwards. Data on the four most populous European countries (France, Germany, Italy, UK) imply that changes in the industry structure are fast, and industry turnover is positively associated with employment growth. Furthermore, successful rural areas and towns areas experience stronger employment growth in hospitality, and in the culture industry, respectively. The evidence also indicates that there are large differences in employment growth across towns and rural areas. The second chapter studies the labor-market effects of barriers for Romanian immigration to Spain, the worldwide seventh largest bilateral migration corridor between 2000 and 2010. Effects on native workers are identified by geographical differences in the exposure to the restrictions at the province level. The results imply that the employment-growth rate of natives is systematically higher in provinces that are more exposed to the restrictions, particularly for young and low-educated individuals. However, migration barriers also induce downward adjustments in the educational composition of occupations. Short-term effects on labor productivity are uniformly negative, but imprecisely estimated. This third chapter combines worker-level occupational task data for 1979--2012 with a novel data set for the pre-computer era to study the labor-market effects of deroutinization. I find that deroutinization occurs primarily between occupations in the pre-computer era, but within occupations afterwards. Because changes in occupational tasks occur over and above changes in educational attainment, they may explain shrinking wages and falling employment shares of middle-skilled workers that cannot be easily explained by mere educational upgrading. The results imply that initially more routine occupations experience relative employment-share, but no wage declines between 1979 and 2012. Effects on labor shares of initially more routine industries are largely insignificant.