Collaborative Proposal: Understanding the City Size Wage Gap

合作提案：了解城市规模的工资差距

• 批准号: 0720944
• 负责人: Ronni Pavan
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Rochester
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-08-15 至 2010-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0720944&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Proposal; Understanding; City; Size

In 2000, hourly wages of prime-age men were 31 percent higher in metropolitan areas of over 2.5 million people than those of less than 100 thousand people. Moreover, the relationship between wages and population was monotonically increasing by about 1 percentage point for each additional 100 thousand in population over the full range of metropolitan area size. This monotonic relationship is robust to controls for age, schooling and labor market experience. The existence of this city size wage gap implies that workers are more productive in larger cities. Otherwise, firms in large cities would migrate to locations with lower costs. This research program would improve our understanding of the causes of the city size wage and productivity gaps. The investigators develop a labor market search model that incorporates endogenous migration between large and small cities. This model is sufficiently rich to allow for recovery of the underlying ability distributions of workers by city size, arrival rates of job offers by ability and location, and returns to experience by ability and location, when structurally estimated using longitudinal data. These estimates facilitate a more complete empirical decomposition of the city size wage gap than is possible using results in existing research. This line of research also produces new empirical evidence on the relative importance of various mechanisms by which larger cities are more productive. While there exists a variety of existing research on the city size wage and productivity gaps finding that differences in wage growth rates and ability sorting as functions of city size are important, there still exists a lack of understanding of the role played by labor market search externalities in particular to generate these productivity gaps. Moreover, existing research largely focuses on estimating causal effects on productivity of one type of externality at a time. Little work has examined the potentially important interaction between various explanations. The main reason is that most of the regression-based procedures commonly used in existing research cannot account for the possibility that those who live in larger cities may have unobserved attributes that make them more productive, and this unobserved ability may interact with the other factors such as the labor market search technology. With free migration between cities and jobs, exogenous variation is extremely difficult to find. The proposed research thus complements the existing literature by making use of a model to help identify components of the city size productivity gap for which there is no exogenous variation. In addition, estimation of the model can be used to perform decompositions that are not possible with results in the existing literature. Broader Impacts: A better understanding of why bigger cities are more productive will greatly inform our understanding the important factors that drive the success or decline of communities. This research program also trains graduate students in the careful construction of data sets and the use of modern modeling, econometric and computational techniques.

2000年，在人口超过250万的大都市地区，壮年男子的小时工资比人口不到10万的大都市地区高出31%。此外，在整个大都市区范围内，每增加10万人口，工资与人口之间的关系就单调增加约1个百分点。这种单调的关系是强大的控制年龄，教育和劳动力市场的经验。这种城市规模工资差距的存在意味着大城市的工人生产力更高。否则，大城市的公司将迁移到成本较低的地方。 该研究计划将提高我们对城市规模工资和生产力差距原因的了解。研究人员开发了一个劳动力市场搜索模型，该模型将大城市和小城市之间的内源性迁移纳入其中。这个模型是足够丰富的，以允许恢复的基本能力分布的工人的城市规模，到达率的工作机会的能力和位置，并返回到经验的能力和位置，在结构上估计使用纵向数据。这些估计有助于更完整的经验分解的城市规模的工资差距比可能使用现有的研究结果。这一系列的研究还产生了新的经验证据，证明了大城市提高生产力的各种机制的相对重要性。虽然存在各种现有的研究城市规模的工资和生产率差距发现，工资增长率和能力排序的差异作为城市规模的功能是重要的，仍然存在着缺乏理解的作用，特别是劳动力市场搜索外部性，以产生这些生产率差距。此外，现有的研究主要集中在估计一种类型的外部性对生产率的因果影响。几乎没有研究过各种解释之间潜在的重要相互作用。主要原因是现有研究中常用的大多数基于回归的程序不能解释居住在大城市的人可能具有使他们更具生产力的未观察到的属性的可能性，并且这种未观察到的能力可能与其他因素相互作用，例如劳动力市场搜索技术。在城市和工作之间自由迁移的情况下，很难找到外生变异。因此，拟议的研究补充了现有的文献，利用一个模型，以帮助确定组成部分的城市规模的生产力差距，没有外生的变化。此外，模型的估计可以用于执行现有文献中不可能的结果的分解。更广泛的影响：更好地理解为什么大城市更有生产力，将大大有助于我们理解推动社区成功或衰落的重要因素。 该研究计划还培养研究生在数据集的精心构建和现代建模，计量经济学和计算技术的使用。