Geographical Variation in Wages of Workers in Low-Wage Service Occupations: A U.S. Metropolitan Area Analysis

Donald R. Grimes, Penelope B. Prime and MaryBeth Walker

Economic Development Quarterly, 2019, vol. 33, issue 2, 121-133

Abstract: Low-wage, service-providing occupations accounted for almost half of all U.S. net job growth between 2006 and 2016. The authors study the variation in wages of low-wage service employees across U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, using cross-sectional estimations for 2016 for the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile wage rates. New data are used to examine the impact of different cost-of-living adjustments on model results, arguing that the preferred adjustment separates housing costs from other costs. The main results are that strong labor market conditions positively contribute to real wages in most of the categories; minimum wages contribute positively to the 10th percentile of four occupations with evidence of influencing higher wages in the 50th and 90th percentiles; and using the authors’ cost-of-living adjustment and controlling for housing costs, the presence of an educated population did not substantially raise wages in the four low-wage, low-skill occupations.

Keywords: wages; education; geography/agglomeration/clusters; industrial location; occupation; skill (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891242419836493 (text/html)

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:sae:ecdequ:v:33:y:2019:i:2:p:121-133

DOI: 10.1177/0891242419836493

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development Quarterly
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().