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Title: Essays in Economic Geography and Development

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2015

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Abstract: This dissertation investigates the role of trade and trade frictions in shaping the internal structure of economies over time. The first chapter investigates how trade costs in generating the spatial distribution of wages and employment across regions, a classic question in economic geography. It make several contributions to the extensive theoretical and empirical literature on this question. First, building on the recent literature I show that for a wide class of economic geography models the positive implications of changes in trade costs are entirely captured by two reduced form elasticities: the elasticities of wages and employment with respect to market access. Second, I develop a novel instrumental variable approach to consistently estimating these elasticities from changes in observed wages and employment using exogenous changes in the incomes of each location’s trading partners. I implement this approach using data on U.S. MSAs between 1990 and 2007 and find that wages and employment are quite sensitive to differences in market access due to trade costs. Counterfactual simulations indicate that eliminating trade costs would result in large shifts in employment from the Northeast towards the South . . .

Url: https://escholarship.org/content/qt9kz7w47p/qt9kz7w47p.pdf

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Authors: Bartelme, Dominick Gabriel

Institution: University of California, Berkeley

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other

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