Presentations on the ERSA and EEA conferences

Jan Cornelius Peters presented a joint paper with Annekatrin Niebuhr and Duncan Roth from the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg entitled "Dynamic agglomeration effects of foreigners and natives - The role of experience in high-quality sectors, tasks and establishments”. The authors examine the wage growth of workers over the course of individual employment histories and the observation that wages in rural areas grow more slowly on average than wages in agglomerations. Their results so far indicate that about half of the slower wage growth in rural areas can be explained by the industries, tasks, and establishments in which workers gain their work experience. On average, they offer fewer opportunities to accumulate new knowledge than jobs in metropolitan areas.

Damiaan Persyn presented his work on regional wage rigidity at the ERSA Congress. He examines the extent to which biases arise in statistical analyses when they are conducted at different spatial aggregate levels. Two types of bias are examined: Biases due to aggregation in the presence of a nonlinear relationship on the one hand, and biases that occur when dynamically heterogeneous relationships are aggregated on the other. The results identify the latter as the main cause of biased estimates. When comparing the national level with the regional level, they can amount to several 100%.

At the EEA conference, Damiaan Persyn presented a joint paper with Liesbeth Colen. In their analysis, for different forms of spatial economic interaction, such as migration, trade or commuting, they find that the attraction of large regions is smaller for short distances than for longer distances. They explain this strong deviation from the prediction of classical gravity models by means of discrete decision models.