Amenities and regional differences in returns to worker characteristics

Regional Growth and Regional Decline

“…His study includes country fixed effects and instruments the cultural variables using long-run historical data, nineteenth-century literacy rates and early (1600-1850) political institutions, both measured at the regional level. 36 His results suggest that, although the regions within each country have long shared the same formal institutions, historical data help to explain contemporary outcomes, with the effects mediated by cultural and social norms. The tenor of these findings is consistent with Banerjee and Iyer (2005) and Dell (2010), suggesting that regional outcomes can often be traced back many decades.…”

“…There is a large literature which links regional variation in wages and rents to physical geography through amenities such as better weather. A general finding is that some of the regional variation in wages can be explained by differences in climate-related amenities (Roback, 1982;Beeson, 1991). And researchers primarily interested in the effects of economic geography sometimes find effects of measures of physical geography in regional wage regressions (for example, Amiti and Cameron, 2007).…”

Local Fiscal Policies and Urban Wage Structures

“…We extend Beeson's (1991) model of the effect of non-produced amenities on wage structure to include fiscal characteristics of the local government, and extend Gyourko andTracy's (1989, 1991) examination of the relationship between local fiscal policies and average wages to look at the effect of local fiscal policies on the distribution of wages. The model demonstrates that different tax structures and different mixes of goods provided by local governments can result in different distributions of gross wages because the values of taxes and local public goods to different types of households can be capitalized into wages or land prices.…”

“…We follow the literature on the sources of long-run differences in average wages across cities (see, for example, Roback (1982), Gyourko andTracy (1989, 1991), Beeson (1991)) to construct a model of equilibrium wage inequality. We then use data on 131 metropolitan areas from the 1980, 1990, and 2000Censuses of Population and the 1977, 1987, and 1997 Censuses of Governments to investigate the relationship between urban wage structure and local fiscal policy.…”

Quality of Life, Firm Productivity, and the Value of Amenities across Canadian Cities

“…Furthermore, we account for multiple household types to allow for language groups, like Roback (1988) and Beeson (1991), but in a richer setting that deals with issues of aggregation and productivity measurement.…”