Corralling the Sprawling Jobs, for the Economy: Three Essays on Measuring Job Sprawl and Its Impacts on Regional Migration and Wages

Abstract

This dissertation discusses the issue of the spatial dispersion of employment in metropolitan America and its implications along the two dimensions of regional migration patterns and wages. In Chapter I, I focus on defining and measuring job sprawl by constructing a Moran’s I index for twenty industries across 369 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) over a six-year period. I investigate whether this new measure varies across time, geography, industry, and spatial scale, finding meaningful variation across all dimensions. Notably, I measure the degree to which spatial scale selection impacts job sprawl variation in its interactions. Additionally, this methodology addresses the modifiable aerial unit problem (MAUP) by distributing industry employment data across a standardized grid. This chapter establishes the framework for understanding job sprawl’s structure, which subsequent chapters use to analyze its influence on migration patterns and wage outcomes.

Chapter II is a contribution to migration literature in economics. I focus on whether my job sprawl measure explains patterns in inter-regional migration patterns in the U.S. Using MSAs aggregated data and Psuedo-Poisson Maximum Likelihood (PPML) procedures to a migration model, I find that it does, but that migrants are more sensitive to the dispersion and concentration of overall employment rather than that of their specific industry.

Finally, in Chapter III, I add to the well-trodden issue of urban wages and offer my job sprawl measurement as a candidate for agglomeration. Using two-stage least squares (2SLS) and historical instruments of 1930 farmland share of land and 1930 radio market penetration to account for the endogeneity in job sprawl, I find that the elasticity of job sprawl on wages is statistically significant in a manner to suggest that greater employment concentration in an MSA increases wages. Contrastingly, I find that own-industry concentration creates a sort of punishment to wages, possibly due to monopsony effects or ineffective zoning regulations. As a byproduct, I corroborate the elasticity of density on wages reported in other works.