Search Results
Journal Article
Employment trends vary in three of Missouri's metro areas
Working Paper
Urban crime and labor mobility
We present a model of crime where two municipalities exist within a metro area (MSA). Consistent with the literature, local law enforcement has a crime reduction effect and a crime diversion effect. The former confers a spillover benefit to the other municipality, while the latter a spillover cost. If the net spillovers are positive (negative), then the respective Nash enforcement levels are too low (high) from the perspective of the MSA. When we allow for Tiebout type mobility, labor will move to the location offering lower disutility crime (including the tax burden). To attract labor both ...
Working Paper
Worker turnover, industry localization, and producer size
Empirically, large employers have been shown to devote greater resources to filling vacancies than small employers. Following this evidence, this paper offers a theory of producer size based on labor market search, whereby a key factor in the determination of producer's total employment is the ease with which workers can be found to fill jobs that are, periodically, vacated. Since the geographic localization of industry has long been conjectured to facilitate the search process, the model provides an explanation for the observed positive association between average producer size and the ...
Working Paper
Human capital externalities and adult mortality in the U.S.
Human capital is now widely recognized to confer numerous benefits, including higher incomes, lower incidence of unemployment, and better health, to those who invest in it. Yet, recent evidence suggests that it also produces larger, social (external) benefits, such as greater aggregate income and productivity as well as lower rates of crime and political corruption. This paper considers whether human capital also delivers external benefits via reduced mortality. That is, after conditioning on various individual-specific characteristics including income and education, do we observe lower rates ...
Journal Article
Wage gap widens, especially in cities
Over the past 30 years, the gap between what workers at the high end of the scale earn compared with wages at the low end of the scale has widened dramatically. The divide is especially pronounced today in cities.
Journal Article
Evidence on wage inequality, worker education, and technology
The rise in U.S. wage inequality over the past two decades is commonly associated with an increase in the use of "skill-biased" technologies (e.g., computer equipment) in the workplace, yet relatively few studies have attempted to measure the direct link between the two. This paper explores the relationship among inequality, worker education levels, and workplace computer usage using a sample of 230 U.S. industries between 1983 and 2002. The results generate two primary conclusions: First, this rising inequality in the United States has been caused predominantly by increasing wage ...
Journal Article
Neighborhoods that don't work
Unemployment is becoming more concentrated. Neighborhoods that had high unemployment in 1980 had even higher unemployment 20 years later. What are the possible reasons-and solutions-for this trend?
Working Paper
The economic performance of cities: a Markov-switching approach
This paper examines the determinants of employment growth in metro areas. To obtain growth rates, we use a Markov-switching model that separates a city?s growth path into two distinct phases (high and low), each with its own growth rate. The simple average growth rate over some period is, therefore, the weighted average of the high-phase and low-phase growth rates, with the weight being the frequency of the two phases. We estimate the effects of a variety of factors separately for the high-phase and low-phase growth rates, along with the frequency of the low phase. We find that growth in the ...
Working Paper
Cities, skills, and inequality
The surge in U.S. wage inequality over the past several decades is now commonly attributed to an increase in the returns paid to skill. Although theories differ with respect to why, specifically, this increase has come about, many agree that it is strongly tied to the increase in the relative supply of skilled (i.e. highly educated) workers in the U.S. labor market. A greater supply of skilled labor, for example, may have induced skill-biased technological change or generated greater stratification of workers by skill across firms or jobs. Given that metropolitan areas in the U.S. have long ...
Journal Article
Urban decentralization and income inequality: is sprawl associated with rising income segregation across neighborhoods?
Existing research shows an inverse relationship between urban density and the degree of income inequality within metropolitan areas; this information suggests that as urban areas spread out, they become increasingly segregated by income. This paper examines this hypothesis using data covering more than 165,000 block groups within 359 U.S. metropolitan areas for the years 1980, 1990, and 2000. The findings indicate that income inequality-defined by the variance of the log household income distribution-does indeed rise significantly as urban density declines. This increase, however, is ...