Skills and urban wage premium

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between urban size and productivity for workers allocated to occupations with different skill profiles. The data come from the Annual Social Information Relation (RAIS) and the database developed by Maciente (2013), which is essentially derived from the Occupational Information Network (ONET – US Department of Labor). For each occupation, three scores, representing the intensity of the cognitive, social and motor skills involved in their activity were created. We found that agglomeration gains do not manifest in the same way for all workers in an urban center. There is a pattern in which the importance of cognitive skills grows as the size of the agglomerations increases.