Three Essays on Labor and Urban Economics PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Three Essays on Labor and Urban Economics PDF full book. Access full book title Three Essays on Labor and Urban Economics by Mark Johnson Lewis. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Mark Johnson Lewis Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 119
Book Description
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.
Author: Mark Johnson Lewis Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 119
Book Description
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.
Author: Daniel Ringo Publisher: ISBN: Category : College attendance Languages : en Pages : 96
Book Description
"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.
Author: Chia-Hua (Gary) Lin Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 213
Book Description
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.
Author: Adam W. Perdue Publisher: ISBN: Category : Economics Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
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.
Author: Yorgos Y. Papageorgiou Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 1461549477 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
Over the past thirty years, urban economic theory has been one of the most active areas of urban and regional economic research. Just as static general equilibrium theory is at the core of modern microeconomics, so is the topic of this book - the static allocation of resources within a city and between cities - at the core of urban economic theory. An Essay on Urban Economic Theory well reflects the state of the field. Part I provides an elegant, coherent, and rigorous presentation of several variants of the monocentric (city) model - as the centerpiece of urban economic theory - treating equilibrium, optimum, and comparative statistics. Part II explores less familiar and even some uncharted territory. The monocentric model looks at a single city in isolation, taking as given a central business district surrounded by residences. Part II, in contrast, makes the intra-urban location of residential and non-residential activity the outcome of the fundamental tradeoff between the propensity to interact and the aversion to crowding; the resulting pattern of agglomeration may be polycentric. Part II also develops models of an urbanized economy with trade between specialized cities and examines how the market-determined size distribution of cities differs from the optimum. This book launches a new series, Advances in Urban and Regional Economics. The series aims to provide an outlet for longer scholarly works dealing with topics in urban and regional economics.
Author: Matthew Michael Miller Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 159
Book Description
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.
Author: Keyoung David Lee Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 181
Book Description
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.
Author: Mark Johnson Lewis
Author: Mark Johnson Lewis
Author: Mads Christian Hejlesen
Author: Daniel Ringo
Author: Chia-Hua (Gary) Lin
Author: Adam W. Perdue
Author: Yorgos Y. Papageorgiou
Author: Matthew Michael Miller
Author: William Spencer Vickrey
Author: 
Author: Keyoung David Lee