The Sources of the Urban Wage Premium by Worker Skills

Martin Andersson, Johan Klaesson and Johan Larsson

No 2014/6, Papers in Innovation Studies from Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research

Abstract: We estimate the respective importance of spatial sorting and agglomeration economies in explaining the urban wage premium for workers with different sets of skills. Sorting is the main source of the wage premium. Agglomeration economies are in general small, but are larger for workers with skills associated with non-routine job tasks. They also appear to involve human capital accumulation, as evidenced by the change in the wage of workers moving away from denser regions. For workers with routine jobs, agglomeration economies are virtually non-existent. Our results provide further evidence of spatial density bringing about productivity advantages primarily in contexts when problem-solving and interaction with others are important.

Keywords: spatial sorting; selection; learning; non-routine skills; spatial wage disparities; density; agglomeration economies; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2014-05-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (69)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wp.circle.lu.se/upload/CIRCLE/workingpapers/201406_Andersson_et_al.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:hhs:lucirc:2014_006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Innovation Studies from Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research, Lund University, PO Box 117, SE-22100 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Torben Schubert ().