Employment markets do not work like you suggest. For example, when many people have children, it locks them in to their current job, at least for a while. They

Employment markets do not work like you suggest. For example, when many people have children, it locks them in to their current job, at least for a while. They have to depend on the parental leave, they need stability and insurance coverage while dealing with a newborn, and their time is taken up with new responsibilities so severely that there’s no way to study, practice and prepare for intense interviews. If market compensation was truly based on some notion of all the external factors that make a person willing to accept a certain amount of pay, then you should see people getting pay cuts when they have children. But you don’t. In fact, having children is historically correlated with raises, one theory being that it communicates fealty to your employer that you are accepting a life responsibility that yokes you to that employer more strongly - but this affect varies across different cultures and different types of companies. The same is true for working remotely. There is no “market rate” for a person already working for you aside from what you already pay them. There is no comparable substitute person in the new geographic market that you can swap in for them. They already work for you. Any salary arbitrage by location would already have to have been priced in when you hired that person in the first place. Them moving to a new location doesn’t suddenly mean they are fungible with a new local substitute - and in fact it’s quite the opposite.