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Cited by 3,152

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Wages, Rents, and the Quality of Life

Roback, Jennifer·1982·Journal of Political Economy

Abstract

This study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities. The theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive, then the sign of the wage gradient is unclear while the rent gradient is positive. The theory is extended to include the housing market and nontraded goods. These extensions require little modification of the conclusion. The empirical work on wages shows that the regional wage differences can be explained largely by these local attributes. With the use of site price data, implicit prices are estimated and quality of life rankings for the cities are computed.

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Metadata

Authors
Roback, J.
Venue
Journal of Political Economy
Published
1982-12
Volume
90
Issue
6
Pages
1257-1278
ISSN
  • 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-534X
OpenAlex
W1982417766
Cited by
3,152
References
0
FWCI
14.50
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Wages, Rents, and the Quality of Life. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/261120
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Roback, J. (1982). Wages, Rents, and the Quality of Life. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/261120

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.