Urbanization and Inequality: The Geography of Wage Disparities

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This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Michael Storper at the University of California, Los Angeles, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the impact of urbanization on income inequality across U.S. cities. In larger and denser urban areas workers on average have higher wage and salary incomes, a phenomenon known as the “urban wage premium.” Yet the urban wage premium appears to vary substantially for workers in different groups. Recent research suggests there are demographic dimensions to the urban wage premium, generating a positive cross-sectional relationship between levels of urbanization across U.S. cities and wage gaps. This research will probe these disparities in the urban wage premium further, with methods and data sources that are new to the related scholarly literature. This work will inform our understanding of how urban planners and policymakers can promote equity and inclusion in urban economies.More specifically, the proposed research will ask 1) do increases in density and population within city-regions over time cause wage inequality to increase and 2) what mechanisms underlie these disparate impacts of urbanization? The first question will be explored with panel regression models using data on individual workers across a broad number of city-regions from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The second question will be examined with semi-structured interviews and annotated mapping exercises with workers who have lived in one large and one much smaller California city-region (specifically people who have lived in either greater Los Angeles or San Francisco and either greater Fresno or Sacramento). A core hypothesis that will be tested is whether more urbanized city-regions increase the challenges people face in navigating employment opportunities, housing/neighborhood quality, commute times, and daily activities in ways that have disproportionately adverse wage effects for workers. This research will contribute to our understanding of why the most prosperous U.S. city-regions also tend to be among the most unequal with a novel framework that integrates spatial and labor market considerations as drivers of inequality.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.