Download or read book Three Essays on Labor and Urban Economics written by Mark Johnson Lewis and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three unrelated essays in the fields of labor and urban economics. The first essay exploits the creation of a formal college system in Quebec in the late 1960's as a quasi-experiment to estimate the value of community college. Focusing on the effect of the policy on English-speaking Quebecois, the creation of the CEGEPs (Colleges of General and Vocational Education) is shown to increase schooling by about a third of a year for both men and women, without diverting students from university. Despite increasing educational attainment, estimates of the impact of CEGEP on wages are negative. Analysis suggests the negative estimates can be understood as a combination of lost labor market experience, a decrease in the return to university, and an insignificant return to CEGEP. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls and across years of data. Possible interpretations of the results are discussed. The second essay, co-authored with William Wheaton, examines the relationship between labor market agglomeration and wages. Using the 5% public use micro sample of the 1990 U.S. census, we find that observationally equivalent workers in the manufacturing sector earn higher wages when they are in urban labor markets that have a larger share of national or metropolitan employment in their same occupation and industry groups. Quantitatively, the effect is large, with an elasticity (measured at the means) of between 1.2 and 3.6 for these effects. We interpret the willingness of firms to pay more for equivalent workers in dense markets as evidence of an agglomeration economy in urban labor. The third chapter estimates the effect of employment dispersion on average commute times in American cities. Using a sample of over two hundred cities, I find that residents of cities where employment is more geographically disperse have lower average commute times than residents of cities where employment is more centralized. The results are robust to the inclusion of city fixed effects. An instrumental variables strategy is employed to try to account for potential simultaneity between changes in employment dispersion and changes in commute times.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Urban Economics written by Mads Christian Hejlesen and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Urban and Labor Economics written by Daniel Ringo and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation contributes to two literatures: Urban Economics and Labor Economics. In the first chapter I estimate the effect of home ownership on individual workers' unemployment and wage growth, as well as other labor market outcomes. Because of higher moving costs, home owners will be less willing than renters to relocate for work and could therefore face longer unemployment spells. To elaborate on this hypothesis, credited to Oswald (1996), I build a simple search model and obtain a set of labor market predictions to test. The current microeconomic literature has reached mixed results regarding home ownership's impact, with most studies concluding that home ownership reduces unemployment. I show that the instruments used are likely to be invalid because of, among other reasons, Tiebout (1956) type sorting into housing markets. I use an instrumental variable free of the endogeneity present in other work: the county level home ownership rate when and where the worker grew up. This IV affects workers' preferences for housing but not, conditional on my covariates, their labor market ability. My results indicate that home ownership is a significant hindrance to mobility, and homeowners suffer longer unemployment spells and slower wage growth because of it. In the second chapter I use a dynamic model of neighborhood choice to estimate household preferences over the demographic characteristics of a neighborhood. I focus on the racial mix, average income and housing price level of a neighborhood, and whether households prefer neighbors that are similar to themselves. Identification of these preferences is complicated by the social aspect of neighborhood amenities. A household's valuation of a particular choice (neighborhood) is a function of the choices other households in the market have made and will make in the future. I show that demographic characteristics of a neighborhood are therefore endogenous to neighborhood quality. Standard estimates of preferences over neighbors may be biased by the presence of such unobservable local amenities. I develop a framework to correct this problem based on a careful delineation of the information households could have access to before and after they make their decisions. The model I build has the advantage over the literature of being able to produce self-consistent predictions about demographic changes. I deal with the low frequency of observations in my data set, the decennial census, by simulating local housing markets between data collection periods. After controlling for type-specific preferences for the physical amenities of neighborhoods, I find a universal preference for higher income neighbors. In contrast to much of the literature, my results suggest white households have no aversion to minority neighbors. In the third chapter I estimate the effect of parental credit scores on the child's probability of attending and completing college. Parents in the US are increasingly supplementing the student loans available to their children with unsecured debt in their own name. This is the first paper on this topic to make use of direct observations of credit scores, rather than rely on proxies such as wealth shocks. I find that good parental credit significantly improves the child's probability of attending college, with a smaller (although still significant) effect on the probability of completing a four-year degree. I provide evidence that the estimated relationship is causal and not biased by, for example, unobserved ability. Additionally, I show that credit scores may affect attendance through channels other than access to the student loan market. I hypothesize households substitute the potential to borrow for precautionary savings"--Pages iii-iv.

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Urban Economics written by Chia-Hua (Gary) Lin and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays that examine how two prominent global trends-globalization and climate change-impact the growing spatial inequality in the United States. The first chapter, "Trade Liberalization and Skill Acquisition," focuses on how trade liberalization affects workers' skill acquisition responses. Workhorse trade models, such as the Heckscher-Ohlin model, predict that trade liberalization increases capital-abundant countries' specialization in capital-intensive sectors and creates economic incentives for workers to upgrade their skills, such as by investing in college education. In this study, I assess how a prominent U.S. trade liberalization policy affected college attainment. The empirical approach leverages geographic variation in import exposure after China obtained permanent normal trade relation status in 2000. Results show that the import shock significantly raised college enrollment, particularly at two-year colleges and public colleges. However, evidence strongly suggests that the shock did not increase college completion. One potential mechanism for the gap between college enrollment and completion is a trade-induced decline in student-oriented resources at public colleges. The second chapter, "High-Skilled Immigration and Native Task Specialization in U.S. Cities," concerns the topic of increased global economic integration through international migration. Specifically, I investigate how the influx of high-skilled immigrants affected the occupational choices of native-born workers in urban economies. Standard theory, such as the Roy model, predicts that high-skilled immigrants will self-select into math-intensive occupations in which they have a comparative advantage over native workers. To test this theory, I take advantage of the influx of college-educated immigrants in science, math, technology, and engineering (STEM) fields after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, which established temporary working visas, such as the H-1B. The estimates from an instrumental variable approach indicate that increases in foreign talent in math-intensive tasks increased the specialization of college-educated natives in social-intensive tasks. Evidence suggests that this labor reallocation occurred within occupations at the top of the task distribution. The productivity gains from task specialization accrued to both college and noncollege natives. All experienced significant positive wage gains. The findings provide suggestive evidence that cities benefit from the inflow of highly skilled immigrants through their direct contribution to the local economy (e.g., innovation) and from the increased task specialization of its workforce. In the third chapter, "Local Public Finance Dynamics in the Face of Rising Climate Risk," a joint work with Rhiannon Jerch and Matthew E. Kahn, we assess the fiscal impacts of climate-change-induced environmental shocks on local public good provision. The conventional wisdom is that cities are at increasing risk of experiencing severe climate shocks, but they are not adequately prepared for these shocks. Natural disasters, including hurricanes and floods, can exert severe budgetary pressure on local governments' ability to provide critical infrastructure, goods, and services. Yet, very little is known about the effects of these shocks on local public finance. In this paper, we show that hurricanes cause local revenues to fall significantly, and this loss of local revenue persists up to a decade after the hurricane and leads to reductions in municipal bond ratings. The connection between local revenue loss and bond ratings demonstrates that climatic shocks can exacerbate direct local fiscal pressures: cities deemed riskier by ratings agencies face higher costs of borrowing debt and thereby face constraints to investing in climate change adaptation.

Download or read book Essays in Urban Economics and Local Labor Markets written by Adam W. Perdue and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This dissertation consists of two essays exploring the often noted dispersion of economic activity within cities. Focusing in particular on the phenomenon of polycentricity, these essays explore the relationship between employment centers and spatial and economic outcomes of cities. The first essay explores the implications of two common proposed criteria for identifying an employment center. Does the area represent a local concentration of employment? Does the area affect the local population density of the city? Using data on both place of employment and place of residence, I propose a new method for testing the relationship between concentrations of employment and population density within a metropolitan area. First a recently developed statistical method is used to identify concentrations of employment using data on place of employment. Second, I propose two methods for estimating the extent of the radius of influence for an employment center, using the relationship between tract of employment and tract of residence. Third, I propose a new specification for the entrance of distance into the polycentric regression. This new specification allows the impacts of the concentrations of employments on density to be positive, following the theoretical hypothesis. I use this new specification to jointly estimate the local gradients of 21 identified concentrations of employment in the Houston metropolitan area on their local population density. I find that not all identified employment concentrations have the expected significant positive gradients, and thus do not qualify as employment centers. I also find that the estimated gradients are sensitive to estimates for the radius of influence for each employment concentration, and that the level of employment in an employment concentration, alone, is not a strong predictor of significant local impact on population density or on the size of the estimated gradient. The second essay tests for the theoretically predicted relationships between the number of employment centers in a city, and the city's transport costs and wages. Urban area vehicle miles travelled rise with an increase in the number of employment centers in an urban area, while commute times are unaffected. These findings contradict the common hypothesis that additional employment centers lower transport costs by allowing workers to live closer to work. Instead, it appears that if transport costs are falling they do so through a fall in per unit distance price. I find that urban area average wages fall with an increase in the number of employment centers. I also find that average wages increase as a larger share of employment locates within employment centers. These two findings support the belief in the presence of agglomeration economies within employment centers that increases in concentration. In a competitive equilibrium the formation of additional employment centers have externalities in both the costs and benefits, thus it is not clear if the efficient number of employment centers will be formed within an urban area. This is explored through an investigation of the determinants of the share of urban area employment that locates in employment centers. I find that the predicted employment share maximizing number of employment centers increases with urban area size.

Download or read book Essays on Urban and Labor Economics written by Raven E. Saks and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Public and Urban Economics written by William Spencer Vickrey and published by Free Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Urban and Labor Economics written by Matthew Michael Miller and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American cities, after decades of decline, are regaining affluent and highly educated residents. This dissertation examines these trends at the neighborhood level and documents that resurgence, in the form of gentrification, is prevalent in cities, specifically in downtown neighborhoods near employment centers. My results indicate a fundamental shift from city center decline to growth around 1990, which motivates my focus on exploring two novel causes of gentrification. In Chapter 1, I demonstrate that declining gender wage gaps since 1980, and the associated influence on female labor force participation and marriage decisions, are one cause of gentrification. As women increasingly invest in human capital and delay marriage they are more likely to move to, and remain in, urban neighborhoods close to employments areas, allowing these neighborhoods to develop high-quality amenities which facilitate further redevelopment. I document that as the gender wage gap declines so too does the probability of marriage and that, in turn, marital status factors heavily into family residential location decisions, with singles systematically opting to live closer to employment centers. Overall, I find that falling gender wage gaps had a significant but heterogeneous effect on neighborhood prosperity that benefited those neighborhoods nearest the city center. Specifically, I find that the drop in the gender wage gap from 1970 to 2010 can explain 40\% of the average national change in city center income over the same period. One potential factor that influenced the decline in gender wage gaps was a shift in the labor market returns to social skills, a shift that disproportionately aligned with female skill endowments relative to men. I return to this topic in Chapter 3. In Chapter 2, I document the role that condominium development played in gentrification. The advent of condominiums offered high income individuals a legal form to own, rather than rent, high-density real estate close to employment centers. I use condominium conversion ordinances at the municipal level as a source of exogenous variation in condominium development. Using a differences-in-differences set-up, I find that the passage of ordinances limited the development of condominiums in cities subject to regulations that made it more costly to convert housing stock to condominiums. With this approach, I am able to establish a causal effect of condominium development on certain gentrification outcomes, including income and education. In Chapter 3, I introduce a framework for estimating the labor market returns to social capital and explore related mechanisms. I find that the wage return to increasing one's high school network by approximately five friends is equivalent to the return to one additional year of schooling. To better understand the mechanisms that underlie this return, I introduce a game theory model wherein students optimize their time allocation between studying and socializing. Empirical results are consistent with model predictions, specifically in that students make social investments in activities, such as drinking alcohol, that generate friendships at the expense of academic achievement. As an application, I demonstrate baseline estimates that suggest there are positive returns to attending a so-called "party" school for college.

Download or read book Three Essays in Labor Economics A Study of the Modern Urban Labor Market in China written by Qian Sun and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This thesis is composed of three studies that examine three different aspects of the modern urban labor market in China: State-owned Enterprises (SOE) wage premium, employment and labor mobility, and public-sector reforms. The first chapter studies the SOE wage premium in the period 1995-2013. It uses the latest data and methods to estimate the premium. Evidence suggests that SOE wage premium has diminished and become insignificant since late 1990s and estimates in previous research are biased. The second chapter studies the employment and mobility patterns in the period 2010-2014. Evidence reveals significant heterogeneity in employment and mobility outcomes between demographic and educational groups. The last chapter studies the economic consequences of counterfactual public-sector policies. It rationalizes the observed data pattern in a job search framework and quantifies the effects of counterfactual employment and wage policies in public sector on unemployment and labor income distribution in the urban areas. Simulation results suggest that changing public-sector employment rules has a smaller effect on unemployment than changing public-sector wage rules. " --

Download or read book Essays in Urban and Labor Economics written by Brian J. Asquith and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation answers three questions in urban and labor economics. Chapter 1 investigates under what conditions wealthy, high-skilled landowners wind up worse off when they use housing regulations to make their communities harder for poorer, low-skill workers to move into. If there is labor complementarity in production between high-skill and low-skill workers, low-skill workers will have lower productivity when they cannot advantage themselves of neighborhood effects, which in turn will hurt high-skill workers. Chapter 2 asks whether rent control, a strong form of housing regulations, incentivizes landlords to evict their tenants when the unregulated rents rise. Exploiting a known price shock to different residential buildings throughout San Francisco over an 11 year period, I find that a 2% increase in prices leads to a 1% increase in the monthly probability of an eviction from a controlled unit. The analysis also highlights the perverse incentives created by rent control, that medium-term (3-5 year) market withdrawals increase when prices increase. Chapter 3 studies whether grandchildren change their grandparents' labor force participation, and then researches whether the fall and rise in labor force participation between 1970 and 2009 can be ascribed to the rise and fall in grandparenthood due largely to the Baby Boom. I find that being a grandparent lowers labor force attachment for both grandfathers and grandmothers on both the intensive and extensive margin, but that grandchildren play only a limited role in the trends in older men's labor force participation.

Download or read book Essays in Urban and Labor Economics written by Keyoung David Lee and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores topics in urban and labor economics, separately and together. In Chapter 1, I explore human capital spillovers between workers and across neighborhoods. I first show that college-educated and non-college workers tend to work in the same Census tracts. I then estimate an economic geography model and find a positive spillover effect of nearby college workers but a negative spillover effect of nearby non-college workers on a worker's income. Both spillover effects decay very quickly, having no effect beyond three miles. I conduct counterfactual exercises to assess the benefits of a Los Angeles policy. The exercise shows that policies increasing density of college jobs provide benefit to both the targeted and surrounding areas, suggesting an important margin for urban policymakers to influence worker productivity in local areas. Chapter 2 studies the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to provide the first comprehensive assessment of the short- and long-term effects of means-tested youth employment programs. We use digitized enrollee records from the CCC program in Colorado and New Mexico and matched these records to the 1940 Census, WWII enlistment records, Social Security Administration records, and death certificates. Overall, we find significant long-term benefits in both longevity and earnings, suggesting short and medium-term evaluations underestimate the returns of training programs, as do those that fail to consider effects on longevity. Chapter 3 examines the housing market effects of inclusionary zoning policies (IZPs). IZPs have been implemented to spur construction of below-market housing to tackle the issue of housing affordability. They are popular with local governments because the direct costs of creating affordable housing are borne by developers, but their effects are theoretically ambiguous. I set up an empirical strategy that exploits variation in geography and timing in a difference-in-discontinuity framework to examine the effect of New York City's mandatory IZP on housing supply and prices. I find while transaction prices increase following the policy, building activity also increases. This suggests that models considering IZP as a tax on development are too simplistic and further research is required to disentangle these findings.

Download or read book Three Essays on Urban Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Local Economics written by Yichen Su and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores various topics in urban economics, labor economics and public economics. The first chapter studies why central city neighborhoods in America became gentrified in the recent few decades. In the past three decades, American central city neighborhoods have experienced an influx of high-income, highly skilled residents and an exodus of low-income, low-skilled residents. This gentrification of central city neighborhoods has reversed decades of decline in urban centers. In this chapter, I test the hypothesis that an important driving force behind gentrification is the rise in the value of highly skilled workers' time. To perform the test, I estimate a spatial equilibrium model of neighborhood choice. In the model, workers choose the neighborhood in which they live based on their value of time, commute times, rents, and amenities. I measure the differential growth in the value of time for each occupation by analyzing changes in the cross-sectional relationship between residual earnings and hours worked in Census data. My empirical strategy exploits the variation in the spatial distribution of jobs in different occupations. This allows me to separate the demand for shorter commute times from the demand for local amenities. I find that workers in occupations that experience greater growth in the value of time are more likely to locate in neighborhoods with shorter commute times. The initial shock to demand for central city housing by high-skilled workers creates endogenous amenity improvement in the affected neighborhoods, which furthers gentrification because additional high-skilled workers are attracted by the improved amenities. While the estimates of my model indicate that changes in the value of time are likely an important driving force behind gentrification, the effects are substantially magnified by endogenous amenity improvement. The estimates also imply that the welfare gap between high- and low-skilled workers (which takes into account not just earnings but also the value of time, rents, and amenities) has grown more than the earnings gap between high- and low-skilled workers. The second chapter studies the welfare implications of local consumption amenities. Assessing local benefits of consumption amenities is faced with two challenges. First, the benefits of consumption amenities (e.g. restaurants) are often spatially diffused. Evaluating the impact of consumption amenities on residents requires an understanding of how the benefits of amenity diffuse through distance. Second, evaluating how each type of amenity (e.g. restaurants vs. gyms vs. museums) differentially contribute to the overall welfare of residents is challenging due to identification problems. To address these challenges of spatial diffusion and aggregation, I construct and estimate a model of amenity choice and use the model framework to empirically evaluate the welfare implication of spatial distribution of consumption amenities. In the model, I allow agents at each location to choose bundles of visits to various types of consumption amenities and which amenity establishments to visit based on their taste for each type of amenities, degrees of substitutability between choices of amenity establishments, cost of visits and cost of travel. The features of the model microfound the varying rates of spatial diffusion of amenity benefits and the weights people put on each type of amenity with deep preference parameters. After estimating the model parameters using a combination of time use surveys and geocoded data of amenity establishments, I assess how changes in local consumption amenities can affect the welfare of local residents using this model. In the third chapter, I study how non-Asians and non-Hispanics' choices for ethnic products brands are affected by the increasing presence of Asians and Hispanic residents in the past decade. In the past few decades, the growth in Asian and Hispanic population significantly changes the ethnic composition of neighborhoods throughout the United States. I show that between 2004 and 2016, non-Asian's expenditure share on Asian brands increased by a large amount in a number of product groups. But non-Hispanics' expenditure shares on Hispanic brands generally remain stable, despite robust growth in Hispanic population. I explain this pattern by showing that Asian brand entries were much stronger than Hispanic brand entries. I also show that the rising expenditure share on Asian brands can be partially explained by consumers' increasing likelihood of visiting retailers that sell Asian brands.

Download or read book A Companion to Urban Economics written by Richard J. Arnott and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Urban Economics provides a state-of-the-artoverview of this field, communicating its intellectual richnessthrough a diverse portfolio of authors and topics. Unique in both its rigor and international treatment An ideal supplementary textbook in upper-level undergraduateurban economics courses, or in master's level and professionalcourses, providing students with the necessary foundation to tacklemore advanced topics in urban economics Contains contributions from the world’s leading urbaneconomists

Download or read book Economy in Society written by Michael J. Piore and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prominent economists discuss internal labor markets, the dynamics of immigration, labor market regulation, and other key topics in the work of Michael J. Piore. In Economy in Society, five prominent social scientists honor Michael J. Piore in original essays that explore key topics in Piore's work and make significant independent contributions in their own right. Piore is distinctive for his original research that explores the interaction of social, political, and economic considerations in the labor market and in the economic development of nations and regions. The essays in this volume reflect this rigorous interdisciplinary approach to important social and economic questions. M. Diane Burton's essay extends our understanding of internal labor markets by considering the influence of surrounding firms; Natasha Iskander builds on Piore's theory of immigration with a study of Mexican construction workers in two cities; Suzanne Berger highlights insights from Piore's work on technology and industrial development; Andrew Schrank takes up the theme of regulatory discretion; and Charles Sabel discusses theories of public bureaucracy.

Download or read book Essays in Labour Urban Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Urban Economics written by Mark John Kutzbach and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays relating to urban, transportation, and labor economics, all of which focus on challenges facing large cities. While the first and second chapters examine rising car use and migration in developing countries, the third chapter examines cities in California, fragmented by their size and traffic congestion. While the first chapter is a theoretical analysis and uses numerical simulations, the second and third chapters are empirical and use microdata on households and business establishments. Chapter 1, "Motorization in developing countries," examines the rise in car use and decline in bus use in developing countries using a theoretical, mode choice model and numerical simulations. This analysis of commuter car/bus mode choice shows that in addition to rising income, other factors may drive rising car use at the urban level including: greater income inequality, which can both increase or decrease car use; traffic congestion, which hinders buses more than cars; and policy interventions, which can reduce congestion by maintaining bus service as an alternate travel mode, even as incomes rise. Chapter 2, "Migration and the next generation," estimates the effect of migrating to a more developed region of a developing country on the educational attainment of migrants' children by comparing migrants, who have moved from Brazil's Northeast region to the more developed state of Sao Paulo, to non-migrants, who remain in the Northeast. Because migration is likely to be selective, this analysis uses state level instrumental variables of distance and past migration rates to identify the effect of migration. Instrumental variables estimation finds a negative effect, suggesting that migration may make children no better off, and possibly worse off. Chapter 3, "Access to workers and employers," attributes economies of agglomeration to either labor market pooling or employer-based productivity spillovers by estimating the effect of access to same-industry employment, other-industry employment, and specialized workers using census tract level data for four industries. The results show that both access to specialized workers and access to same-industry employers contribute to economies of agglomeration and that the magnitude of the worker effect is large relative to employer-based productivity spillovers.