Migration, Frictional Unemployment, and Welfare-Improving Labor Policies

Studies have suggested that there exists job search and recruiting friction in urban areas. This paper constructs a two-sector (rural and urban) model involving this factor and investigates how it affects migration and what the optimal policies should be. An analysis shows that frictional urban unemployment brings about intersector wage differentials and that an economy almost always has distortion in the absence of government intervention. Tax and subsidy policies that remove the distortion are explored. Setting urban wages appropriately is also shown to attain the optimum. Finally, we explore the criterion to judge whether changing urban wages as a policy, such as the minimum wage law, enhances social welfare. Copyright Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2004