Cities, Lights, and Skills in Developing Economies / Jonathan I. Dingel, Antonio Miscio, Donald R. Davis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dingel, Jonathan I.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Miscio, Antonio.

Davis, Donald R.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w25678.

NBER working paper series no. w25678

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2019.

Summary:

In developed economies, agglomeration is skill-biased: larger cities are skill-abundant and exhibit higher skilled wage premia. This paper characterizes the spatial distributions of skills in Brazil, China, and India. To facilitate comparisons with developed-economy findings, we construct metropolitan areas for each of these economies by aggregating finer geographic units on the basis of contiguous areas of light in nighttime satellite images. Our results validate this procedure. These lights-based metropolitan areas mirror commuting-based definitions in the United States and Brazil. In China and India, which lack commuting-based definitions, lights-based metropolitan populations follow a power law, while administrative units do not. Examining variation in relative quantities and prices of skill across these metropolitan areas, we conclude that agglomeration is also skill-biased in Brazil, China, and India.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2019.