Title: "Skill allocation and urban ameniti es in the developing world" (joint with Andrii Parkhomenko and Daniel Velásquez-Cabrera)
Abstract:
We use individual geocoded data from Peru and document that the city-size w age premium is larger for low-skilled than for high-skilled workers\, in co ntrast with most developed countries. We interpret this evidence using a mo del of location choice with private amenity goods and non-homothetic prefer ences. Skilled workers enjoy higher incomes and devote a higher expenditure share to amenity goods\, such as private schools or middle-class neighborh oods. The supply of these amenities is subject to a fixed cost\, and only s ufficiently large cities have enough demand to offer them. Thus\, skilled w orkers demand a higher wage premium to live in small cities\, and the retur ns to working in a large city are smaller than for their unskilled counterp arts. Our quantitative exercises indicate that the mechanism accounts for t wo-thirds of the gap in the city-size wage premium between high- and low-sk illed workers.
LOCATION:IONA 533 GEO:49.260872;-123.113952 URL;VALUE=URI:https://economics.ubc.ca/events/event/jorge-de-la-roca-usc-de velopment-political-economy-seminar/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20230312T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR