The role of education for amenity based sorting in British cities

This paper investigates the relation between amenities and skills by looking at the sorting behavior of skilled individuals across neighbourhoods within British cities. Using a detailed micro dataset on housing transactions we recover a composite measure of local amenities that captures the level of attractiveness of each neighbourhood. By combining the amenity measure with data on British individuals we analyse how the cost associated with the consumption of amenities is distributed across education groups and across neighborhoods within cities defined as integrated labour markets. Results show that, holding constant the availability of job opportunities, high skilled individuals exhibit a moderate preference bias towards amenity consumption as they tend to sort into more attractive neighborhoods than lower skilled individuals with the same income.