Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Local Price Variation and Local Labor Market Outcomes

本论文的研究探讨了劳动经济学与城市/区域经济学的交叉。这项工作的动机是两个关键的观察：(1)城市经济学的理论工作提供了很好的理由来预期不同地点的价格差异，并且经验证据证实这种差异是巨大的。(2)劳动力市场行为的标准经济模型，如人力资本投资、劳动力供给或歧视，是在个人面临相同价格的假设(隐含或显性)下推导出来的。更重要的是，基于这些模型的实证研究几乎总是使用来自国家数据源的数据，但忽略了个人在当地劳动力市场生活和工作的事实，因此面临不同的当地价格。研究人员建议在模型中重新审视教育回报、劳动力供应和种族歧视的标准理论，这些模型承认人们生活在不同的地点，因此面临不同的价格。然后，她打算评估这些理论见解可能具有的经验重要性。实证工作将需要对当地劳动力市场进行评估，因此需要使用非常大的数据集。这位研究人员被要求从国家科学基金会获得资金，以支持她在密歇根研究数据中心使用美国人口普查的长格式文件。这项提案中提出的初步理论工作表明，当地价格变化可能会影响劳动经济学的重要研究对象，包括重返教育和劳动力参与。初步的实证工作表明，美国不同城市的教育回报率确实存在很大差异，女性劳动力供应也存在很大的系统性差异。很有可能的是，如果研究人员忽视这一变化，由此产生的经验性工作将导致严重的误解。关于这个问题的文献似乎很少。更广泛的影响经验劳动经济学是一个重要的领域，它为所得税的影响、教育补贴的可取性以及福利政策的分析等重要问题的政策分析提供了关键输入。这项提案中概述的研究有望提高我们进行这项有价值的研究的能力。

The dissertation research described in this proposal explores the intersection of labor economics and urban/regional economics. The work is motivated by two key observations: (1) Theoretical work in urban economics provides good reasons to expect price variation across locations, and empirical evidence verifies that this variation is substantial. (2) Standard economic models of labor market behavior, such as human capital investment, labor supply, or discrimination, are derived under the assumption (implicit or explicit) that individuals face the same prices. More importantly, empirical work based on these models nearly always uses data from national data sources, but ignore the fact the individuals live and work in local labor markets and thus face different local prices. The researcher proposes to revisit standard theories of the returns to education, labor supply, and racial discrimination in models that recognize that people live in different locations and thus face different prices. She then intends to evaluate the likely empirical importance of these theoretical insights. The empirical work will entail evaluations of local labor markets, and thus will require the use of very large data sets. The researcher is requested funding from the National Science Foundation to support her use of the long-form files of the U.S. Census at the Michigan Research Data Center. Intellectual Merit Preliminary theoretical work, presented in this proposal, shows how local price variation is likely to affect important objects of study in labor economics, including the return to education and labor force participation. Preliminary empirical work demonstrates that there are indeed very large differences in the measured returns to education across cities in the U.S., and also substantial systematic differences in female labor supply. It is quite possible that if researchers ignore this variation, resulting empirical work will lead to serious misunderstandings. There appears to be little literature on this issue. Broader Impacts Empirical labor economics is an important enterprise, providing key inputs to policy analysis on such important issues as the impact of income taxes, the advisability of subsidizing education, and the analysis of welfare policy. The research outlined in this proposal holds promise of improving our ability to conduct this valuable research.