Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherein a state's representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversify his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

In this paper we estimate the impact of transition on earnings inequality using data across Polish regions 1994-1997. Our central result is that earnings inequality is higher in regions that are more advanced in restructuring (higher labor productivity/job reallocation rates), controlling for...

This paper investigates the impact of labor markets and economies of agglomeration on firms location. We show that the existence of a lower bound on wage (e.g., a minimum wage or a reservation wage) introduces asymmetric location of firms. Moreover, changes in that lower bound or in global...

This paper offers novel evidence on agglomeration economies by examining the link between total factor productivity (TFP) and employment density in Italy. TFP is estimated for a large sample of manufacturing firms and then aggregated at the level of Local Labor Market Areas (LLMAs). We tackle...

Since 1970, the share of Black individuals living in suburbs of larger cities has risen from 16 to 36 percent. We present three facts illustrating how this suburbanization has changed spatial inequality. First, suburbanization entirely accounts for Black households’ relative improvements in...