Spatial Sorting
研究了技能互补性如何影响工人跨城市流动和技能分布,发现大城市同时吸引高技能和低技能工人,技能分布尾部更厚,与极端技能互补性一致。
We investigate the role of skill complementarities in production and mobility across cities. The nature of the complementarities determines the equilibrium skill distribution across cities. With extreme-skill complementarity, the skill distribution has thicker tails in large cities; with top-skill complementarity, there is first-order stochastic dominance. Using wage and housing price data, we find robust evidence of thick tails in large cities: large cities disproportionately attract both high- and low-skilled workers, while average skills are constant across city size. This pattern of spatial sorting is consistent with extreme-skill complementarity, where the productivity of high-skilled workers and of the providers of low-skilled services are mutually enhanced.