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Three Essays on Inequality Across Space

Iturra Rivera, Victor Hugo
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1463398077

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics.
The first essay analyzes how important are both firms and households in shaping spatial wage differences in Chile, a developing country with a particular geography. The results indicate that amenities perform a key role in explaining spatial wage differentials in Chile. Because of its heterogeneous geography, natural endowments contribute significantly to the spatial wage patterns. However, man-made amenities also emerge as a strong force. The results also indicate that both firms and household preferences play a significant role in explaining spatial wage differences in Chile. Attractive regions for firms have higher average wage but these regions do not represent amenable places for households, with both productivity and amenity components pushing average wages up. Finally, it appears that most Chilean firms derive benefits from natural resource endowments and the associated concentration of economic activity in particular sectors. In the second study, spatial differences in the return to schooling are analyzed. The fact that more attractive places for workers may display a lower return to schooling, has been a great concern for both labor and urban/regional literatures. In this essay their theoretical predictions are examined along with providing empirical evidence for Chile. The results suggest that those amenities related to firms seem to be the most important in affecting regional labor markets, in fact, the bias that affects the return to schooling estimate when site characteristics are omitted, seems to be highly influenced by differences in firms’ productivity across space. However, the second set of empirical results show that both amenities related to firms (density) and to households (diversity and temperature) are significant, which confirms how important man-made amenities would be in order to understand the spatial pattern of the return to schooling in Chile. Finally, the third study examines the effect of local government employment on income inequality across U.S counties. Particular attention has been paid to local governments in the United States since their past counter-cyclical responses to economic recessions. However, this behavior has not characterized the role of local governments in the last Great Recession. This study examines their effect on one of the most important population well-being indicators, which is income inequality. The results indicate that metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties are affected differently by government employments. While for metropolitan areas local government employment enhances population well-being by reducing income inequality, nonmetropolitan counties are mainly affected by federal government employment. Also, the results suggest that bias is a serious issue when analyzing the impact of government on population well-being, hiding the real impact of government employment on well-being indicators.
Mark Partridge (Advisor)
Linda Lobao (Committee Member)
Alessandra Faggian (Committee Member)
91 p.
Economics; Regional Studies

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Citations

  • Iturra Rivera, V. H. (2016). Three Essays on Inequality Across Space [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1463398077

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Iturra Rivera, Victor. Three Essays on Inequality Across Space. 2016. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1463398077.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Iturra Rivera, Victor. "Three Essays on Inequality Across Space." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1463398077

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1463398077
484
© 2016, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.