Can Regional Employment Disparities Explain the Allocation of Human Capital Across Space?

This paper examines the determinants of skill-selective regional migration in a context where modelling the migration decision as a wage-maximizing process may be insufficient due to persistent employment disparities. Based on a Borjas-type framework it is shown that high-skilled workers are disproportionately attracted to regions with higher mean wages and employment chances as well as higher regional wage and employment inequalities. Estimates from a labour flow fixed-effects model and a general methods of moments (GMM) estimator show that these predictions hold, but only employment disparities induce a robust and significant skill sorting. The paper thus establishes a missing link about why employment disparities may actually be self-reinforcing.