To boil down the economy of labor for his university students, Mikal Skuterud often poses them a basic question: Would they prefer to graduate when jobs are scarce or when workers are scarce?
They mostly vote for a time of worker scarcity. Workers can benefit in a vast job pool through employers’ competition to attract them — with better wages, for example — though this dynamic varies across industries, said Professor Skuterud, a labor economist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who specializes in immigration.
“Labor economists tend to see labor shortages not as a first-order economic problem that governments need to solve,” he said.
