The Urban Wage Premium in Historical Perspective

Kyle Butts, Taylor Jaworski and Carl Kitchens

No 31387, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We estimate the urban wage premium in the United States from 1940 to 2010. Drawing on recent advances in the literature on selection on unobservables, we show how to control for heterogeneity in the characteristics of individuals that choose to live in cities to address endogenous sorting. Estimates from naive comparisons of individuals living in urban versus non-urban areas substantially overstate the urban wage premium. We find that the premium is highest in the middle of the twentieth century (about 12 percent in 1940 and 1950) relative to the early in twenty-first century (declining to a few percent by 2010). Overall, the urban wage premium is decreasing and sorting explains a larger fraction of the difference in urban versus non-urban earnings across our sample period.

JEL-codes: N92 R0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lma and nep-ure
Note: DAE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31387.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31387

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31387

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().