This volume is devoted to three key themes central to studies in regional science: the sub-national labor market, migration, and mobility, and their analysis. The book brings together essays that cover a wide range of topics including the development of uncertainty in national and subnational population projections; the impacts of widening and deepening human capital; the relationship between migration, neighborhood change, and area-based urban policy; the facilitating role played by outmigration and remittances in economic transition; and the contrasting importance of quality of life and quality of business for domestic and international migrants. All of the contributions here are by leading figures in their fields and employ state-of-the art methodologies. Given the variety of topics and themes covered this book, it will appeal to a broad range of readers interested in both regional science and related disciplines such as demography, population economics, and public policy.

This volume contains seven original and innovative articles which analyze labor market transitions, how individuals progress from school to work, choose a particular occupation, move up the job ladder, and finally withdraw from the workforce to retirement. Investigations are done by race and gender; and social implications are examined.

In this dissertation I study the labor market behavior of sciences and engineering (S & E) doctorates trained and employed in the US. The first essay is an empirical study of task-to-task transitions based on the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (1973-2001). It first assesses the relevance of the careers of doctorates to S & E in general, and research and development (R & D) in particular. Second, it evaluates the participation rates and mobility patterns of doctorates in careers of different types using a transition model with independent competing risks. The second essay extends the empirical framework described above and specifies a dynamic model of occupational choices with symmetric learning about one of the task- specific abilities and dependence on past performance to explain the empirical career patterns described in the first essay. The predictions of the model are used to evaluate the effects of two counterfactual experiments on the supply of research skill. The third essay studies geographic choices for first employment of doctorates using the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) 1957-2005. Decisions of Americans, Canadians, and third country nationals to stay in the US after their PhD versus moving to Canada are compared. Individual characteristics and differences in political and economic conditions and career opportunities in the US versus Canada are evaluated to explain the observed differences in the choice of location.