Expensive and low-price places to live: regional price levels and the agglomeration wage differential in Western Germany

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the agglomeration wage differential. One of the open research question is whether wage differences between large cities and the rural country are due to unobserved differences in regional price levels. In this paper information on regional price levels for western German regions is used to assess this wage differential. Since for many regions price information is not available. Multiple Imputation is used to generate completed data sets. It can be shown that this strategy is more reliable than simply using predictions of regression analysis. The results obtained show that the agglomeration wage differential in Germany is smaller than in the US, and that only a minor part of it can be explained by differences in prices.