Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Moscarini, Giuseppe
Abstract
The dissertation consists of two independent essays that examine how worker and firm sorting across local labor markets shape both regional and aggregate economic outcomes and what are the policy implications. The first chapter of this dissertation studies why productive workers and firms locate together in dense cities. I develop a new theory of two-sided sorting in which both heterogeneous workers and firms sort across space. The location choices of workers and firms affect each other and endogenously generate spatial disparities in the presence of three essential forces: complementarity between worker and firm productivity, random matching within frictional local labor markets, and congestion costs. I demonstrate that the decentralized equilibrium exhibits excessive concentration of workers and firms, and dispersing them away from dense locations can mitigate congestion without reducing output. I then provide direct empirical evidence of the two-sided sorting mechanism using German administrative microdata. An exogenous increase in the quality of the workforce in a location results in more productive firms choosing that location. Finally, to quantify the implications of the model, I calibrate it to U.S. regional data and show that policies that relocate workers and firms toward less dense areas can increase welfare. The second chapter investigates the importance of spatial firm sorting for wage inequality both between and within local labor markets. We develop a novel model in which heterogeneous firms first choose a location and then hire workers in a frictional labor market. Firms' location choices are guided by a fundamental trade-off: Operating in productive locations increases output per worker, but sharing a labor market with other productive firms makes it hard to poach and retain workers, and hence limits firm size. Positive sorting---with productive firms settling in productive locations---emerges as the unique equilibrium if firm and location productivity are sufficient complements or labor market frictions are sufficiently large. Positive sorting steepens the job ladder in productive locations and, as a consequence, increases both their average wages and wage dispersion. We estimate our model using administrative data from Germany and identify firm sorting from a novel fact: Labor shares are lower in productive locations, which indicates a higher concentration of top firms with strong monopsony power. Positive firm sorting can account for at least 15% of the spatial variation in average wages and for 40% of the spatial variation in within-location wage dispersion.
Recommended Citation
OH, RYUNGHA, "Essays on Spatial Sorting and Labor Markets" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1250.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1250
