Would you rather earn less money and work closer to home, or travel a little farther to earn more money? As companies build warehouses and data centres farther from residential centres, worker preferences about what researchers call the commuting burden dictate not just the size of the labour market those companies draw workers from, but how much money those workers will expect to be paid for the extra trouble of getting to work. These issues are at the centre of labour economist Abdelrahman Amer’s research.
“The main idea is to understand how reducing workers’ commuting burden, primarily through transit infrastructure and an improved subway network, can help them access better firms,” explained the PhD Candidate at the Department of Economics. “It’s not just about accessing better firms; it’s also about having more options.”
In his job market paper, Monopsony in Space: Commuting & Labor Market Power, Amer investigated the labour market changes after the expansion of Vancouver’s Skytrain in 2009 and 2010. He found that improved transit access led to a 1.5–2% increase in earnings in the area served by the expansion once he incorporated commuting costs, wage-posting, and residential choices. His model showed that the subway expansion helped workers move to more productive firms and reduced labor market concentration by 10–35% in affected areas. He also explored how preferences for proximity shape wage markdowns across space. Quantifying those changes was especially significant given the widely held attitudes and habits associated with commuting in Canada.
“Workers really dislike commuting,” Amer said. “In fact, in Canada, nearly 40% of workers work within five kilometers of their home—which I found quite surprising. It shows that labor markets are highly local, even more so than city commuting zones.”
Like other scholars pursuing complex research questions, Amer combined methodologies and considerations from different subsets of economics to build his experimental model.
“Labor economics takes market power seriously,” he explained. “It acknowledges that employers have wage-setting power and that labor market concentration matters. But it doesn’t always take geography into account. It often models labor markets as disconnected spatial units. Urban economics, on the other hand, cares deeply about spatial overlaps, commuting, and how workers move, but it doesn’t focus on labor market power. What my paper does is bring both perspectives together. It says: we care about commuting and market power.”
The combination of labour and spatial economics is revealing valuable information policymakers and decision makers can use in their public transit planning. The necessity of sharing novel interdisciplinary approaches to research like his own has become apparent to both Amer and other economists. Last year, he organized the LAPUFIR seminar series with fellow PhD candidate Sobia Jafry.
“It’s the Labour, Public Finance, and Related Fields seminar series,” Amer said. “We used to joke about the acronym. It wasn’t a great name, but we stuck with it. The idea behind LAPUFIR was to bring together research that spans labor economics, public finance, and adjacent fields. It was a space for people working on different but connected topics to share ideas. I think it helped build bridges across subfields that don’t always talk to each other.”
His efforts in research and collaborating across subfields has garnered attention.
“Abdelrahman’s research is rigorous and policy-relevant,” said Professor Kory Kroft, Amer’s thesis supervisor. “As a scholar, he shows real grit and intellectual honesty—he is determined, seeks the truth, and follows the evidence. He co-authors with faculty, is an active and constructive presence in seminars, and is a generous, friendly colleague who elevates the department and student community.”
The importance of rigour in research and following the evidence are values Amer seeks to instill in his own students. Through that process, he found that teaching, like public transit, moves in at least two different directions.
“I understand concepts better when I teach them,” he said. “It sounds a little selfish, but it really benefits everyone. Sometimes I’ll be explaining a concept, and it just clicks, and I’ll say out loud, ‘thank you, I understand it now.’ Then I’ll explain it again, and when it clicks for everyone in the room, it’s a great feeling. That’s the social aspect of acquiring information. It’s not just about absorbing facts. It’s about engaging with others to make sense of them.”
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