Differences in Employment Outcomes for College Town Stayers and Leavers Areas surrounding colleges and universities are often able to build their local stock of human capital by retaining recent graduates in the area after they finish their education. This paper classifies 41 U.S. metropolitan areas as “college towns” and investigates differences in employment outcomes between college graduates...

Labor Market Pooling, Outsourcing and Labor Contracts Economic regions, such as urban agglomerations, face external demand and price shocks that produce income risk. Workers in large and diversified agglomerations may benefit from reduced wage volatility, while firms may outsource the production of intermediate goods and realize benefits from Chamberlinian externalities. Firms may also protect ...

We present a new approach for the empirical investigation of agglomeration patterns. We examine the clustering of manufacturing firms by identifying patterns of spatial network formation that deviate from randomly generated networks. Using firm-level panel data from Vietnam we calculate transitivity, a measure to determine the strength of clustering of manufacturing firms. We then test whether ...

Girls for Sale? Child Sex Ratio and Girls Trafficking in India Illegal trafficking of women is a result of their disadvantageous position in the society that is often reflected in increasing preference for son and neglect for daughters. Multiple reports point to India as country confronted with both higher levels of illegal trafficking of girls and abnormal child sex ratios in favor of boys. In...

The paper provides estimates of the effect of economic inequality on middle class well being in Switzerland. Economic well being is proxied by a person’s satisfaction with his/her income. Two inequality indicators are used, one standard (the Gini coefficient of the pre-tax income distribution) and one novel (the number of luxury car registrations per 1000 population). Identification is through ...

We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over specialization, and the falling cost of automating routine, codifiable job tasks. Applying a spatial equilibrium model, we co...

We study the geographic incidence and efficiency of an income tax by estimating a spatial equilibrium model with heterogeneous workers. The US shifts households out high-productivity cities, leading to locational inefficiency 0.25 percent output. Removing distortions increases inequality because more educated are mobile own larger shares land. Flattening schedule, or introducing cost-of-living ...

We provide empirical evidence on the nature of spatial externalities in a matching model for the UK. We use a monthly panel of outflows, unemployment and vacancy stocks data from the registers at Jobcentres in the UK; these are mapped on to travel-to-work areas. We find evidence of significant spill-over effects that are generally in line with the predictions of theory. For example, we find tha...

We develop an urban equilibrium job search model with employed and unemployed individuals where residential mobility of the unemployed is restricted. We assume a standard mono-centric model (firms are located in one location), but allow for imperfect labour markets. In contrast to models with perfect labour markets, the model predicts that the employed are only partially compensated for commuti...