Essays on Human Capital Externalities and Migration

The three chapters of my dissertation explore the role of human capital externalities in accounting for the geographic variation in both wage level and wage growth, and the role of search capital in understanding the patterns of interstate migration in the US.;Chapter 1 shows that wage grows faster with experience in labor markets with larger shares of college-educated workers (college share). An instrumental variable and panel data with individual fixed effects are used to address the potential endogeneity of college share and the sorting of workers across labor markets respectively. The effect of the college share of a labor market is shown to persist after workers leave the market, suggesting that a larger college share raises returns to experience through the accumulation of human capital valuable in all markets.;In chapter 2, using measures of Compulsory Schooling Laws as instruments for state average schooling, we find that one more year of average schooling leads to a 6-8% increase in individual wages. The effect is statistically significant and robust to different specifications. We construct a model where the average human capital of an economy is allowed to affect the productivity of a typical firm in the economy. We estimate that the elasticity of a firm's productivity with respect to the average human capital of the economy is around 0.121.;Chapter 3 builds a model of job search and migration with search capital to understand two major patterns of interstate migration in the US: (1) Around 90% of migrants move in order to take a new job or for job transfer rather than to look for work, and (2) over half of all moves are repeated and return migration. The model allows workers to receive job offers from all locations in the economy and to accumulate search capital that increases the location-specific job arrival rate. The model explains both migration patterns under reasonable parameters.