A large literature has documented a signi cant increase in the return to college over the past 30 years. This increase is typically measured using nominal wages. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas that are characterized by a high cost of housing. This implies that college graduates are increasingly exposed to a high cost of living and that the relative increase in their real wage may be smaller than the relative increase in their nominal wage. To measure the college premium in real terms, I de ate nominal wages using a new CPI that allows for changes in the cost of housing to vary across metropolitan areas and education groups. I nd that half of the documented increase in the return to college between 1980 and 2000 disappears when I use real wages. This nding does not appear to be driven by di erences in housing quality and is robust to a number of alternative speci cations. The implications of this nding for changes in well-being inequality depend on why college graduates sort into expensive cities. Using a simple general equilibrium model, I consider two alternative explanations. First, it is possible that the relative supply of college graduates increases in expensive cities because college graduates are increasingly attracted by amenities located in those cities. In this case, higher cost of housing re ects consumption of desirable local amenities, and there may still be a signi cant increase in well-being inequality even if the increase in real wage inequality is limited. Alternatively, it is possible that the relative demand of college graduates increases in expensive cities due to shifts in the relative productivity of skilled labor. In this case, the relative increase in skilled workers' standard of living is o set by higher cost of living. The empirical evidence indicates that relative demand shifts are more important than relative supply shifts, suggesting that the increase in well-being inequality between 1980 and 2000 is smaller than the increase in nominal wage inequality. I thank David Card, Tom Davido , Ed Glaeser, Chang-Tai Hsieh, Pat Kline, Douglas Krupka and David Levine for insightful conversations, and seminar participants at Berkeley Economics, Berkeley Haas, Collegio Carlo Alberto in Torino, IZA, San Francisco Federal Reserve and UC Merced for many useful comments. I thank Emek Basker for generously providing the Accra data on consumption prices. Issi Romen, Mariana Carrera, Justin Gallagher, Jonas Hjort, Max Kasy and Zach Liscow provided excellent research assistance.
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Paper provided by Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis in its series Working Paper Series with number
34-08.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Joseph Gyourko & Christopher Mayer & Todd Sinai, 2006.
"Superstar Cities,"
NBER Working Papers
12355, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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