The Effect of Residential Crowding on Labor Productivity with Evidence from the Twilight of Polish Socialism

This paper considers the impact of low per capita housing stock on labor productivity. Theoretically, a negative effect may be expected. A low amount of per capita housing leads to greater difficulty in finding housing, which in turn leads to reduced labor mobility and a less-productive allocation of labor. A dynamic model is developed which displays this relationship and which takes into account inter-regional migratory flows induced by regional labor productivity differentials. The empirical part of the paper focuses on cross-sectional information, using primarily 1989 Polish data aggregated at the regional level