The comparative advantage of cities

By Donald R. Davis, Jonathan I. Dingel. Journal of International Economics, 2020

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What determines the distributions of skills, occupations, and industries across cities? We develop a theory to jointly address these fundamental questions about the spatial organization of economies. Our model incorporates a system of cities, their internal urban structures, and a high-dimensional theory of factor-driven comparative advantage. It predicts that larger cities will be skill-abundant and specialize in skill-intensive activities according to the monotone likelihood ratio property. We test the model using data on 270 US metropolitan areas, 3 to 9 educational categories, 22 occupations, and 21 manufacturing industries. The results provide support for our theory's predictions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68ca80499d377d22feee2a8d0fbbe83cd3f46a4d

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Yanos Zylberberg
2. Stephan Heblich

Citations in the corpus

• East-Side Story: Historical Pollution and Persistent Neighborhood Sorting (2016, background): “Our argument further relates to Depro et al. (2015) who argue that neighborhood sorting, rather than environmental injustice, is the reason why poor households are more exposed to environmental disamenities. Finally, our paper shares a common theme with Hanlon (2016), who argues that coal-based poll”