Income levels are higher in cities. The evidence for the income gap between urban and rural areas is overwhelming, but the agglomeration effect is hard to identify. Recent advances make use of individual level data to separate out sorting and instrumentation to handle the endogeneity of...

The large and significant relationship between city population and wages has been well established in the agglomeration literature, and the influence of selection effects on this wage premium is important. This paper contributes new evidence to the understanding of this premium by using two...

Using administrative data for West Germany, this paper investigates whether part of the urban wage premium stems from fierce competition in thick labour markets. We first establish that employers possess less wage-setting power in denser markets. Local differences in wage-setting power predict...