With China's 2001 WTO accession, trade costs between the US and China fell sharply, but the transport costs of Chinese imports within the US remained sizable. We argue that domestic transport costs shield local labor markets from globalization. Using a shift-share design for industry-level...

This paper investigates the relationship between the spatial distribution of occupations with a high content of peer interactions and wages among Italian provinces. At this aim, we use a unique employer-employee dataset obtained by merging administrative data on wages and labor market histories...

This paper analyzes how dynamic agglomeration effects differ between foreign and native workers using administrative data on individual employment biographies. According to our results, both groups benefit, on average, equally from gathering work experience in large labor markets. The exception...

Using linked employer-employee data on labor market biographies of workers in Germany, this paper analyzes where valuable work experience is primarily acquired. It distinguishes between learning effects related to firm size and labor market size. We show that wages increase with the size of the...

We study Chile's labor market responses to trade shocks during 1996-2006, exploiting spatial and time variations in trade exposure arising from initial differences in industry specialization across local labor markets and the evolution of shocks across industries. We take advantage of China's...

The present paper applies several regression-based decomposition methods to analyze the impact of region-, worker-, irm- and sector-speciic determinants on the wage level and the continuous increase in wage inequality between 1995 and 2007 in Germany. In contrast to prior studies, more than 50%...

Local returns to scale in the labor market have been notoriously difficult to disentangle from increasing returns in the product market and from the spatial sorting of workers and firms as a source for regional variation in productivity. In this paper we use the introduction of high-speed rail...

Governments are often willing to subsidize firms on the verge of bankruptcy. The main economic rationale behind these interventions is that a plant closure would not only harm the workers employed in that plant, but create a domino effect on the regional economy as a whole. Yet, little is still...

We propose an integrated framework to discuss the empirical literature on the local determinants of agglomeration effects. We start by presenting the theoretical mechanisms that ground individual and aggregate empirical specifications. We gradually introduce static effects, dynamic effects, and...

This paper examines the relationship between city size, migration, and urban income inequality using the 1% sample of the 2005 Census in the People's Republic of China (PRC). We calculate various measures of within-city income inequality for 252 PRC cities. It is found that city income...