Labor Market Conditions and Geographic Mobility in the Eurozone

The Eurozone crisis has sparked renewed interest in the literature about optimum currency areas, in particular in the role of labor mobility as a mechanism of adjustment to shocks. We study the response of mobility in the Eurozone to national labor market conditions. We measure mobility by using data on stocks of foreign population by nationality. We find that mobility in the Eurozone is relatively low. It responded to national differences in unemployment during the crisis, but neither to national differences in wages nor to national differences in GDP per capita.