In this paper, location choices are driven by households (both blacks and whites) consciously choosing to trade off proximity to neighbors of similar racial backgrounds for proximity to jobs. Because of coordination failures in the location choices, multiple urban equilibria emerge. There is a...

In this paper we study the relationship between ethnic exclusion and earnings in Urban Peru. Our approach to the concept of ethnicity involves the usage of instruments in many of its several dimensions: mother tongue, parental background, religion, migration events and race. In order to...

Since the 1950s, there has been a steady decentralization of entry-level jobs towards the suburbs of American cities, while racial minorities ?and particularly blacks? have remained in city centers. In this context, the spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that because the residential locations of...

We analyze mobility in urban Mexico between three labor market states: working in the formal sector, working in the informal sector, and not working. We use a dynamic multinomial logit panel data model with random effects, explaining the labor market state of each individual during each time...

We analyze wage differentials mobility between the formal and informal sector in urban Mexico, using panel data on five quarters drawn from Mexico?s Urban Employment Survey. We develop a dynamic random effects panel data model. It consists of two separate wage equations for the two sectors and a...

Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities...

This paper proposes an extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition from two to a continuum of comparison groups. The proposed decomposition is then estimated for the case of racial wage differences in urban Peru, exploiting a novel data set that allows the capturing of mestizaje (racial mixtures).

We propose a spatial search-matching model where both job creation and job destruction are endogenous. Workers are ex ante identical but not ex post since their job can be hit by a technological shock, which decreases their productivity. They reside in a city and commuting to the job center...

Persistent productivity gains to rural-urban migrants have been documented by a number of researchers. One interpretation of this result is that individuals learn higher value skills in cities than they would have learned in less dense areas. Another explanation for this result, however, is that...

We develop a standard search-matching model in which mobility costs are so high that it is too costly for workers to relocate when a change in their employment status occurs. We show that, in equilibrium, wages increase with distance to jobs and commuting costs because firms need to compensate...