Knowledge economy, internal migration, and local labour markets
利用意大利2005-2019年雇主-雇员匹配数据，研究发现知识密集型行业扩张增加了非贸易部门工人的工作天数并吸引其迁入，但推高生活成本导致实际工资下降，揭示了知识经济中劳动力需求冲击、工人流动与空间不平等的复杂互动。
The spatial concentration of knowledge-intensive activities can generate multiplicative effects at the local level. This paper investigates how employment growth in knowledge-intensive and tradable sectors affects wage, days worked, and internal migration among non-tradable workers in the local economy. We leverage matched employer-employee social security data for Italy (2005-2019), which enables us to track individual workers across jobs and locations. Our empirical strategy combines a two-step estimation procedure with a shift-share instrument, allowing us to separately identify the roles of worker sorting and local spillovers. We find that the expansion of knowledge-intensive sectors stimulates local employment (intensive margin) and increases the attractiveness of an area for non-tradable workers. A higher presence of workers in tradable and knowledge-intensive industries is also associated with higher nominal wages of non-tradable workers, but only when sorting is not accounted for, suggesting a selective inflow of more productive workers into knowledge hubs. At the same time, the expansion of the knowledge economy seems to drive up local living costs, resulting in a negative effect on real wages. These findings highlight the complex interplay between labour demand shocks, worker mobility, and spatial inequality in the context of the knowledge economy. • Knowledge clusters generate multiplicative effects at the local level. • Fixed-effects models allow to disentangle sorting from local spillovers. • Knowledge sector growth raises days worked and attracts non-tradable workers. • Knowledge hubs display increased sorting of high-earning and mobile individuals. • Living costs rise faster than nominal wages, leading to lower real wages.