In November 2004, the median hourly wage in Florida was $12.50. In Washington State, it was $16.07. On average, in other words, wages were almost 30 percent higher in the Northwest compared to the Southeast. To take a more specific example, the median wage for health-care support occupations (dental assistants, pharmacy aides, hospital orderlies, etc.) was $8.14 in Mississippi and $12.81 in Massachusetts. Dental assistants who moved from Baton Rouge to Boston could expect to see about a 50 percent increase in their hourly wage. [***“Occupational Employment Statistics,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed June 29, 2011, http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oessrcst.htm.***]
People in the United States are free to move from state to state, and many people do indeed move from one state to another every year. People move for many reasons: to go to college, join a girlfriend or boyfriend, or move to the place where they have always dreamed of living (such as New York; Los Angeles; or Burr Ridge, Illinois). People also move to take up new jobs, and one of the things that induces them to take one job rather than another is the wage that it pays. Different wages in different places therefore affect the patterns of migration across the United States.
***Figure 5.5 "Labor Markets in Florida and Washington State" shows the labor markets in Florida and Washington State for November 2004. The cost of living was different in those two states but, to keep our story simple, we ignore these differences. That is, we assume that there is no difference in the price level in the two states. If we set 2004 as the base year, the price level is 1. This means that the real wage is the same as the nominal wage. A more careful analysis would correct for differences in state taxes and the cost of living.
Part (a) of ***Figure 5.5 "Labor Markets in Florida and Washington State" shows the labor market in Florida. The equilibrium wage is $12.50, and the equilibrium level of employment is 1,200 million hours. This is roughly calibrated to the actual experience in Florida, where total employment in 2004 was just under 7.5 million individuals. Part (b) of ***Figure 5.5 "Labor Markets in Florida and Washington State" shows Washington State, where the equilibrium wage is $16.07, and employment is 400 million hours.
We expect that the higher wages in Washington State would attract people to move from Florida to Washington State. Workers would migrate from Florida to Washington State, causing the labor supply curve to shift leftward in Florida and rightward in Washington State. As a consequence, wages would increase in Florida and decrease in Washington State. ***Figure 5.6 "Migration from Florida to Washington State" shows what would happen if the only thing people cared about was wages: migration would stop only when wages were equal in both states. Employment would be lower in Florida and higher in Washington State. (The exact number of people who moved and the new equilibrium wage would depend on the slopes of the supply and demand curves in both labor markets.)
If wages were the only factor affecting people’s decisions, migration would completely equalize real wages across the different state economies. In fact, we do not expect wages to become exactly equal in Florida, Washington State, and the other 48 states of the Union. Differences in both state taxes and the cost of living in different states and cities lead to persistent differences in wages. Some places are less attractive to live than others, so people will need to be paid more to induce them to live there. Our example nevertheless illustrates a key economic principle: people respond to incentives. Individual decisions about where to live respond to differences in real wages. Labor tends to migrate to where it can earn the highest return.
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