Wage Premia in Employment Clusters: How Important Is Worker Heterogeneity?
利用2000年人口普查数据，通过居住地代理工人不可观测的生产力，检验工资与就业集中度的相关性是否由工人异质性解释，发现集聚工资溢价在控制通勤成本后消失，表明差异源于地点而非个人特征。
This article tests whether the correlation between wages and concentration of employment can be explained by unobserved worker productivity. Residential location is used as a proxy for unobserved productivity, and average commute time to workplace is used to test whether location-based productivity differences are compensated away by longer commutes. Analyses using confidential data from the 2000 Decennial Census find that estimates of agglomeration wage premia within metropolitan areas are robust to comparisons within residential location and that estimates do not persist after controlling for commuting costs, suggesting that the productivity differences across locations are due to location, not individual unobservables.