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Working Paper
A tractable city model for aggregative analysis
An analytically tractable city model with external increasing returns is presented. The equilibrium city structure is either monocentric or decentralized. Regardless of which structure prevails, intracity variation in endogenous variables displays exponential decay from the city center, where the decay rates depend only on parameters. Given population, the equilibrium of the model is generically unique. Tractability permits explicit expressions for when a central business district (CBD) will emerge in equilibrium, how external increasing returns affect the steepness of downtown rent ...
Working Paper
Skilled Tradable Services: The Transformation of U.S. High-Skill Labor Markets
We study a group of service industries that are skill-intensive, widely traded, and have recently seen explosive wage growth. Between 1980 and 2015, these ?Skilled Tradable Services? accounted for a sharply increasing share of employment among the highest earning Americans. Unlike any other sector, their wage growth was strongly biased toward the densest local labor markets and the highest paying firms. These services alone explain 30% of the increase in inequality between the 50th and 90th percentiles of the wage distribution. We offer an explanation for these patterns that highlights the ...