The past decade has seen interesting work in many fields of economics on the importance of misallocation for economic outcomes. Hsieh and Klenow’s famous 2009 paper suggested that misallocation of labor and capital in the developing world costs countries like China and India the equivalent of many years of growth. The same two authors have a new paper with Erik Hurst and Chad Jones suggesting that a substantial portion of the growth in the US since 1960 has been via better allocation of workers. In 1960, they note, 94 percent of doctors and lawyers were white men, versus 62 percent today, and we have no reason to believe the innate talent distribution in those fields had changed. Therefore, there were large numbers of women and minorities who would have been talented enough to work in these high-value fields in 1960, but due to misallocation (including in terms of who is educated) did not. Lucia Foster, John Haltiwanger and Chad Syverson have a famous paper in the AER on how to think about reallocation within industries, and the extent to which competition reallocates production from less efficient to more efficient producers; this is important because it is by now well-established that there is an enormous range of productivity within each industry, and hence potentially enormous efficiency gains from proper reallocation away from low-productivity producers.
The really intriguing misallocation question, though, is misallocation of workers across space. Some places are very productive, and others are not. Why don’t workers move? Part of the explanation, particularly in the past few decades, is that due to increasing land use regulation, local changes in total factor productivity increase housing costs, meaning that only high skilled workers gain much by mobility in response to shocks (see, e.g., Ganong and Shoag on the direct question of who benefits from moving, and Hornbeck and Moretti on the effects of productivity shocks on rents and incomes).
A second explanation is that people, quite naturally, value their community. They value their community both because they have friends and often family in the area, and also because they make investments in skills that are well-matched to where they live. For this reason, even if Town A is 10% more productive for the average blue-collar worker, a particular worker in Town B may be reluctant to move if it means giving up community connections or trying to relearn a different skill. This effect appears to be important particularly for people whose original community is low productivity: Deyrugina, Kawano and Levitt showed how those induced out of poor areas of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina would up with higher wages than those whose neighborhoods were not flooded, and (the well-surnamed) Bryan, Chowdhury and Mobarak find large gains in income when they induce poor rural Bangladeshis to temporarily move to cities.
Today’s paper, by Nakamura et al, is interesting because it shows these beneficial effects of being forced out of one’s traditional community can hold even if the community is rich. The authors look at the impact of the 1973 volcanic eruption which destroyed a large portion of the main town, a large fishing village, on Iceland’s Westman Islands. Though the town had only 5200 residents, this actually makes it large by Icelandic standards: even today, there is only one town on the whole island which is both larger than that and located more than 45 minutes drive from the capital. Further, though the town is a fishing village, it was then and is now quite prosperous due to its harbor, a rarity in Southern Iceland. Residents whose houses were destroyed were compensated by the government, and could have either rebuilt on the island or moved away: those with destroyed houses wind up 15 percentage points more likely to move away than islanders whose houses remained intact.
So what happened? If you were a kid when your family moved away, the instrumental variables estimation suggests you got an average of 3.6 more years of schooling and mid-career earnings roughly 30,000 dollars higher than if you’d remained! Adults who left saw, if anything, a slight decrease in their lifetime earnings. Remember that the Westman Islands were and are wealthier than the rest of Iceland, so moving would really only benefit those whose dynasties had comparative advantage in fields other than fishing. In particular, parents with college educations were more likely to be move, conditional on their house being destroyed, than those without. So why did those parents need to be induced by the volcano to pack up? The authors suggest some inability to bargain as a household (the kids benefited, but not the adults), as well as uncertainty (naturally, whether moving would increase kids’ wages forty years later may have been unclear). From the perspective of a choice model, however, the outcome doesn’t seem unusual: parents, due to their community connections and occupational choice, would have considered moving very costly, even if they knew it was in their kid’s best long-term interests.
There is a lesson in the Iceland experience, as well as in the Katrina papers and other similar results: economic policy should focus on people, and not communities. Encouraging closer community ties, for instance, can make reallocation more difficult, and can therefore increase long-run poverty, by increasing the subjective cost of moving. When we ask how to handle long-run poverty in Appalachia, perhaps the answer is to provide assistance for groups who want to move, therefore gaining the benefit of reallocation across space while lessening the perceived cost of moving (my favorite example of clustered moves is that roughly 5% of the world’s Marshall Islanders now live in Springdale, Arkansas!). Likewise, limits on the movement of parolees across states can entrench poverty at precisely the time the parolee likely has the lowest moving costs.
June 2016 Working Paper (No RePEc IDEAS version yet).
A Fine Theorem 