Most of the experiments on the quantum Hall effect (QHE) were made at approximately the same height above sea level. A future international comparison will determine whether the gravitational field g(x) influences the QHE. In the realm of (1+2)-dimensional phenomenological macroscopic electrodynamics, the Ohm-Hall law is metric independent ("topological"). This suggests that it does not couple to g(x). We corroborate this result by a microscopic calculation of the Hall conductance in the presence of a post-Newtonian gravitational field.