Paper Title
Do Local Amenities Increase Monopsony Power?

Abstract
We ask whether workers in high amenity locations are willing to cede greater degrees of monopsony power to their employers in exchange for the ability to remain in their more desirable locales. A theoretical model predicts that, if unobserved moving costs are positively related to local amenities, then the negative returns to seniority should be greater for workers in higher amenity locations than for otherwise similar workers in lower amenity locations. We examine two samples of academic economists, one composed of faculty in public Ph.D.-granting programs and the other of faculty in public M.A.-grant in gprograms. Using prevailing property values as proxies for local amenities, we estimate the negative returns to seniority to be higher for faculty in higher property value locations in both samples.