Trade, location, and wages in the United States

Abstract

This paper estimates a spatial wage structure for the United States.I employ the market-access and supplier-access method of Reddingand Venables (2004), where access is determined using interstate tradedata. Economic geography models predict that state-level wages arecorrelated to this measure, owing to higher levels of demand and betteravailability of intermediate goods in easily accessible regions. Aftercorrecting for omitted-variable bias with exogenous ‘first nature’ regressorsand using the appropriate instruments, I find that the explanatorypower of access-variables is weak in this dataset.