The graph plots race-specific slopes and intercepts for the economic returns of work experience in a large urban area.
Workers in large cities can use their experience to secure successively better jobs. Yet wages of minority workers increased only 25–50% as much as the wages of White workers for each additional year of work experience in large urban areas. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
My new research in @pnas.org
The substantial economic mobility that big cities are thought to offer is very uneven across race/ethnicity. Thanks @rodriguez-pose.bsky.social!
Last thing is I want to give a quick shout out to my colleagues @dyligent.bsky.social and @tkemeny.bsky.social who also just published a very similar paper. Makes me confident we're all on to something here! Links to both papers:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
But it's not just big cities. We find even larger inequalities in experience effects for expensive cities. This suggests high cost AND large populations come together to create particularly strong barriers to Black and Latinx workers accessing good jobs with high levels of upward mobility.
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Each year of experience in one of these occs increases White wages by 88 cents/hr, but only 46 and 61 cents for Black and Latinx workers. This is key, as it is these "high-skill" occs which often make big cities such great places for many to live (and offset high cost-of-living).
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This is largely explained by the far greater returns White workers get from working in occupations that have tasks which require high degrees of "abstract reasoning" and "cognitive skills" (often called "high-skill" occs), which are concentrated in big cities.
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For instance, for each year that a White worker works in a big city, their wages increase by about 42 cents/hr more than if they spent that time outside a big city - this number is about 21 and 10 cents for Black and Latinx workers. Over a career this means 1000s in annual wage inequality.
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We show that this is almost entirely explained by "experience effects" - the initial benefits of locating in a big city are not that different across race, but over time, White workers get much greater returns to each year they spend working in a big city than Black and Latinx workers.
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🚨 I have a new paper in @pnas.org! Big cities provide huge opportunities for workers to climb up the income ladder through their large number and diversity of jobs. Big cities also have higher racial wage inequality, which is getting worse over time.
#geosky #econsky
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Not sure that I necessarily think the following is the case - but couldn’t you also interpret increased household formation as evidence of adequate supply? Households increase because there are units for them to live in. Or am I missing something here?
New paper! We show that since the 1990s many small US cities have become increasingly "disconnected" from major US cities (as measured by inter-firm ties). This occurred despite an overall dramatic rise in connectivity between cities. Disconnected cities are further disadvantaged in many other ways.
they should remind planners and policymakers that density is not inherently good - it has costs, and we need to be mindful of who bears those costs.
show that the relationship between changes in density and changes in inequality is higher when commute times also rise, as well as that changes in density are related to changes in commuting inequality. Should these results be taken as a case against increasing density in cities? Probably not. BUT,
childcare (which disproportionately falls on women) and a career in denser cities is particularly onerous. What explains these relationships? Other research points at ways in which the congestion costs of density may be primarily borne by women and non-White workers. Similarly, I
For race, the density-inequality relationship is primarily among workers with high-incomes, while for gender it is among women and men with low incomes. For gender, I also find density is only related to gender inequality among workers who have children, suggesting that managing
Very excited to have this out! I show that rising density within urban areas is strongly positively related to increases in racial and gender wage inequality, even after controlling for a bunch of stuff at the individual and city levels. #geosky #urbanism #EconSky
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
should remind planners and policymakers that density is not inherently good - it has costs, and we need to be mindful of who bears those costs.
between changes in density and changes in inequality is higher when commute times also rise, as well as that changes in density are related to changes in commuting inequality. Should these results be taken as a case against increasing density in cities? Probably not. BUT, they
(which disproportionately falls on women) and a career in denser cities is particularly onerous. What explains these relationships? Other research points at ways in which the congestion costs of density may be primarily borne by women and non-White workers. Similarly, I show that the relationship
For race, the density-inequality relationship is primarily among workers with high-incomes, while for gender it is among women and men with low incomes. For gender, I also find density is only related to gender inequality among workers who have children, suggesting that managing childcare
This was inspiring to read on todays Nobel winner but also a bit of an indictment of the research funding/academic hiring system here in the U.S. We miss out on a lot of brilliant people and their ideas because of how hard it is to get a permanent position.
www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/h...