Labour Market Effects of International Trade When Mobility is Costly
I build and estimate a dynamic structural model of sectoral choices with heterogeneous workers accumulating human capital that is imperfectly transferable across sectors. Utility costs of switching sectors provides an additional barrier to mobility. Estimating the utility costs by Simulated Minimum Distance on administrative data covering the population of Danish workers and firms, costs are found to be in the range of 10% to 18% of average annual wages. By conducting counterfactual policy experiments, it is shown that the both the imperfect transferability of human capital and the utility costs are important for explaining the slow adjustment of the labour market following shocks to the economy.