This paper presents an empirical framework for analyzing the spatial wage inequality in a Latin American country: Chile. This country is mainly characterized by two stylized facts: the high spatial concentration around metropolitan areas and the key role of natural resources. We consider both...

A true Cost of Living (COL) index measures the expenditure ratio of maintaining a utility level for two price vectors. Its application and empirical testing has been, generally, focalized on a temporal perspective. The aim of this paper is to calculate a spatial COL for the regions of Spain. For...

Social and economic interaction among small spatial units is a phenomenon that has undoubtedly become persistent across time. This implies that labor markets expand through space mainly due to the continuous decrease of transport costs. Thus, greater interaction among spatial units suggests the...

We empirically test the positive relationship between market access and wages stated by New Economic Geography. Contrary to most estimation in other countries, we find evidence of significant spatial heterogeneity of this elasticity across Chilean communities.

Spatial wage inequality among Chilean counties reached its peak in 1994, when it represented 19.2% of total wage inequality. By 2009, spatial inequality had decreased to 10.3%. However, when the model included controls on human capital, spatial inequality fell to 6%. This result implies that...

The aim of this article is to build a spatial housing price index for the Chilean communes (the commune political body similar to a municipality or county). The first step is to recover hedonic prices of three housing attributes by estimating a mixed index model (Bowden, 1992) using a...

This paper describes a methodology to calculate a spatial cost of living index using Colombian data for 2006 that takes into consideration the microeconomic behavior of households. Using the Almost Ideal Demand System and recovering the expenditure functions for the 23 main Colombian cities, the...

We estimate the spatial substitution bias based on the difference between a price index and the true cost of living. We estimate the substitution bias for several different geographical scales, using different base baskets and across several spending quartiles. Our results show a significant...