Do urban wage premia reflect lower amenities? Evidence from Africa

The Political Geography of Cities

“…Channeling government services and investments to particular cities can influence which locations are attractive. Recent empirical evidence even suggests that developing country cities offer higher wages and better amenities than rural locations Gollin et al, 2021). 37 This evidence is does not exploit the type of between city variation we are interested in here but gives us a framework to analyze whether residents of capital cities are better off than residents of comparably dense cities without political status.…”

Consumption CitiesVersusProduction Cities: New Considerations and Evidence

“…As countries develop, people move out of agriculture and engage in urbanbased manufacturing and service activities (Herrendorf et al, 2014). Structural change occurs due to Green Revolutions, which increase food productivity and push labor out of agriculture (Matsuyama, 1992;Gollin, Parente and Rogerson, 2002;Restuccia, Yang and Zhu, 2008;Yang and Zhu, 2013;Lagakos and Waugh, 2013;Gollin, Hansen and Wingender, 2018). In addition, Industrial Revolutions or Service Revolutions increase manufacturing or service productivity and pull labor out of agriculture (Hansen and Prescott, 2002;Lucas, 2004;Alvarez-Cuadrado and Poschke, 2011).…”

“…In addition, Industrial Revolutions or Service Revolutions increase manufacturing or service productivity and pull labor out of agriculture (Hansen and Prescott, 2002;Lucas, 2004;Alvarez-Cuadrado and Poschke, 2011). 1 Gollin et al (2016) (henceforth GJV16) show that only in some developing countries rapid urbanization has been accompanied by industrialization, following the historical patterns observed in richer nations. Manufacturing and tradable services agglomerated in production cities whose growth was driven by the countries' increased production capacity.…”

“…Productivity in manufacturing and non-traditional services varies little across countries, and productivity catch-up in these sectors may explain some of the large gains in aggregate productivity observed across countries (Duarte andRestuccia, 2010, 2020). Hence, low productivity in urban non-tradables in developing economies, and thus the possible lack of catch-up in this sector, might contribute to explaining the lack of 1 Other mechanisms include quality-of-life amenities (Jedwab and Vollrath, 2019;Gollin, Kirchberger and Lagakos, 2021), demographic growth (Jedwab et al, 2017;Castells-Quintana and Wenban-Smith, 2020;Jedwab et al, 2021a), urban-biased policies (Lipton, 1977;Ades and Glaeser, 1995;Davis and Henderson, 2003;Castells-Quintana, 2017), trade (Glaeser, 2014;Venables, 2017), technology (Jedwab et al, 2021c), and disasters (Barrios et al, 2006;Henderson et al, 2017;Jedwab et al, 2021b;Castells-Quintana et al, 2021).…”

Pollution in Ugandan Cities: Do Managers Avoid it or Adapt in Place?

“…Heblich et al (2021) document the persistent effects of industrial pollution on neighborhood sorting within English cities. By focusing on location choices within as opposed to across cities, we also relate to a growing literature on how environmental conditions such as pollution or natural resource availability determine the sorting of firms and households across space and migration decisions(Gollin et al 2021;Liu and Sekhri, 2021;Khanna et al 2021; Chen et al 2017).5 Source: World Bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.PM25.MC.M3?name_desc=true& view=map. PM stands for particulate matter and 2.5 refers to the size of the particles (2.5 micrometers).…”