Two Essays on the Interactions of Urban Labor and Housing Markets in Metropolitan Areas PDF Download

Author: Stephen Leonard Ross
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor market
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: John Yinger
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610445627
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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"Yinger writes as if four decades of protest and progressive legislation have barely altered the terrain upon which minority Americans struggle for equality. He's right....Yinger figures that housing discrimination costs black homebuyers $5.7 billion and Hispanic homebuyers $3.4 billion every three years." —Washington Monthly Nearly three decades after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, illegal housing discrimination against blacks and Hispanics remains rampant in the United States. Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost reports on a landmark nationwide investigation of real estate brokers, comparing their treatment of equally qualified white, black, and Hispanic customers. The study reveals pervasive discrimination. Real estate brokers showed 25 percent fewer homes to the minority buyers, and loan agencies were 60 percent more likely to turn down minority applicants. Realtors and lenders also charged higher prices to minority buyers, withheld or gave insufficient financial and application information, and showed them homes only in non-white neighborhoods. Residents of minority neighborhoods faced further difficulties trying to sell their homes or obtain housing credit and homeowner's insurance. Economist John Yinger provides a lucid account of these disturbing facts and shows how deeply housing discrimination can affect the living conditions, education, and employment of black and Hispanic Americans. Deprived of residential mobility and discouraged from owning their own homes, many minority families are unable to flee stagnant or unsafe neighborhoods. Two thirds of black and Hispanic children are concentrated in high-poverty schools where educational achievement is low and dropout rates are high. The employment possibilities for minority job-seekers are diminished by the ongoing movement of jobs from the cities to the suburbs, where housing discrimination is particularly severe. Altogether, these effects of housing discrimination create a vicious cycle—discrimination imposes social and economic barriers upon blacks and Hispanics, and the resulting hardships fuel the prejudice that leads whites to associate minorities with neighborhood deterioration. Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost provides a history of fair housing and fair lending enforcement and joins the intense debate about integration policy. Yinger proposes a bold, comprehensive program that aims not only to end discrimination in housing and mortgage markets but to reverse their long-term effects by stabilizing poorer neighborhoods and removing the stigma of integration. He urges reforms to strengthen the enforcement powers of HUD and other agencies, provide funding for poor and integrated schools, encourage local housing and race-counseling programs, and shift income tax breaks toward low-income homebuyers. Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost provides valuable insight into the causes, extent, and consequences of housing discrimination—undeniably one of America's most vexing and important problems. This volume speaks directly to the ongoing debate about the nature and causes of poverty and the underclass, civil rights policy, the Community Reinvestment Act, and the plight of our nation's cities.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertation abstracts
Languages : en
Pages : 848

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Author: Adam W. Perdue
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages :

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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: Richard J. Arnott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134352824
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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A collection of the first section of the "Fundamentals of Pure and Applied Economics" series, "Regional and Urban Economics: Parts One and Two" is an encyclopaedia containing eight titles: This volume highlights original contributions in regional and urban economics, concentrating mainly on urban economic theory. The contributions focus on the treatment of space in economic theory. Drawing on the body of literature developed by Von Thunen, Christaller and Losch, these chapters explore empirical, theoretical and applied aspects of urban and regional economics which can be divided into the following areas: Location Theory, "Jean Jaskold Gabszewicz, Jacques-Francois Thisse, Masahisa Fujita "and" Urs Schwiezer" Urban Public Finance, "David E. Wildasin" Urban Dynamics and Urban Externalities, "Takahiro Miyao "and" Yoshitsugu" "Kanemoto" Systems of Cities and Facility Location,

Author: J. Gabszewicz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136472754
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Analyses the economic theory of urban land use in both its positive and normative aspects.

Author: Daniel Ringo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : College attendance
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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"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: Rachel S. Franklin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811392315
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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This volume is devoted to the geographical—or spatial—aspects of population research in regional science, spanning spatial demographic methods for population composition and migration to studies of internal and international migration to investigations of the role of population in related fields such as climate change and economic growth. If spatial aspects of economic growth and development are the flagship of the regional science discipline, population research is the anchor. People migrate, consume, produce, and demand services. People are the source and beneficiaries of national, regional, and local growth and development. Since the origins of regional science, demographic research has been at the core of the discipline. Contributions in this volume are both retrospective and prospective, offering in their ensemble an authoritative overview of demographic research within the field of regional science.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Author: Benjamin Freyd
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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My first chapter studies the origins of gentrification. I propose a mechanism through which a wave of gentrification can be triggered in a neighborhood: the opening of large offices of technology firms. Using information on nine such events and transaction-level housing data, I develop a difference-in-differences strategy that compares house prices in the vicinity of the new office to those in closely-matched neighborhoods slightly further away. I find that property prices rise 11% in treatment areas relative to control areas within two years after the opening. This difference subsides somewhat but remains at +8% five years later. These findings are substantially stronger than in the existing literature and thus suggest that such office openings can have a major impact on their neighborhood. I investigate two mechanisms, agglomeration forces and the development of consumption amenities, through which the impact of a single establishment opening can be amplified and sustained. My second chapter analyses the causes of the shift towards low-income service jobs that American non-college workforce has experience in recent decades. Together with the rise of college-educated workers' incomes, this has strongly contributed to the overall increase in wage inequality. Two main explanations, routinization and consumption spillovers, have been proposed to explain this occupational shift. Although the determinants of these two theories are highly spatially correlated, studies that have exploited regional variations to identify these mechanisms have so far only considered each explanation in isolation, raising confounding concerns. I highlight these concerns and provide reduced-form evidence that both theories operate simultaneously to drive growth in service employment. To strengthen my case, I extend the structural framework proposed in Autor and Dorn (2013) to include consumption spillovers through non-homothetic preferences. I estimate key parameters and assess the relative importance of each theory using simulations from the model. Relative to a model featuring homothetic preferences, my specification yields 57% more regional disparities in the growth of service occupations, which can be interpreted as the contribution of consumption spillovers. While the routinization hypothesis quantitatively dominates, my reduced-form and structural evidence point to sizeable consumption spillover effects that cannot be neglected. My third chapter studies the effects of liberalizing the use of short-term contracts on the labor market outcomes of all workers. It specifically examines the impact of a 2003 change French jurisprudence. This decision from the French Civil Supreme Court - hereafter called the "reform" - extends the scope of a specific type of temporary contract in France, the CDDU (contrat à durée déterminée d'usage), to jobs that are not necessarily temporary by nature. This type of contract is allowed in 16 service sectors and is not restricted in terms of length or number of renewals, giving a lot more flexibility to employers than the standard temporary contract does (CDD, contrat à durée déterminée). I find that this change is associated with an increase in the share of temporary contracts of 2.9 percentage points in the CDDU sectors, while other service sectors only show a 0.7 point increase. This result echoes a frequent finding of temp for permanent substitution in the literature about the deregulation of temporary contract. A second and novel finding is that this reform weighs on young permanent workers' wages, who experience drop of nearly 4% in their wages over the two years following the reform, and little catch up afterwards. I show some evidence that something changed in the relationship between employers and employees in CDDU sectors: the employer's bargaining power seems to have risen as the opportunity to substitute temporary contracts for costly and protected permanent ones has increased.