Outsourcing, Inequality, and Cities

This paper exams how the new technologies affect where people work and where they live, on
both the empirical and theoretical fronts. Its empirical contribution is to show two facts: (i) “back
office” activity like low skill secretarial work is increasingly concentrated in small cities, while “front
office” activity like high skill managerial work is increasingly specialized in large cities; (ii) workers
without college degrees are migrating to small cities, whereas workers with degrees are moving to
large cities.