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Abstract
Hoping to generate employment opportunities for residents,
communities often offer location incentives to businesses. But many
newly created jobs may go to commuters rather than local residents,
resulting in higher incentive costs per local job than perhaps anticipated.
In this paper we examine the allocation of employment
across space, emphasizing the propensity of commuters to “capture”
jobs. Central to our work is an industry-level model of incommuting,
where commuters balance employment and wage opportunities
with relative housing prices and travel costs. Using data
from 65 Pennsylvania counties, our empirical results suggest that the
proportion of jobs filled by in-commuters varies by industry, ranging
from 0.036 (farming) to 0.498 (federal government). Thus communities
courting employers should recognize that local benefits of employment
growth might depend on the industry. Furthermore,
when recruiting industries where there is a high propensity to commute,
communities should pursue regional agreements when offering
incentives so as to internalize some of the spillover effects.