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Journal Article
Human capital growth in a cross section of U.S. metropolitan areas
Growth of human capital, defined as the change in the fraction of a metropolitan area's labor force with a bachelor's degree, is typically viewed as generating a number of desirable outcomes, including economic growth. Yet, in spite of its importance, few empirical studies have explored why some economies accumulate more human capital than others. This paper attempts to do so using a sample of more than 200 metropolitan areas in the United States over the years 1980, 1990, and 2000. The results reveal two consistently significant correlates of human capital growth: population and the existing ...
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 ...
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
Trends in the distributions of income and human capital within metropolitan areas: 1980-2000
Human capital tends to have significant external effects within local markets, increasing the average income of individuals within the same metropolitan area. However, evidence on both human capital spillovers and peer effects in neighborhoods suggests that these effects may be confined to relatively small areas. Hence, the distribution of income gains from average levels of human capital should depend on how that human capital is distributed throughout a city. This paper explores this issue by documenting the extent to which college graduates are residentially segregated across more than ...
Working Paper
Local market scale and the pattern of job changes among young men
In finding a career, workers tend to make numerous job changes, with the majority of 'complex' changes (i.e. those involving changes of industry) occurring relatively early in their working lives. This pattern suggests that workers tend to experiment with different types of work before settling on the one they like best. Of course, since the extent of economic diversity differs substantially across local labor markets in the U.S. (e.g. counties and cities), this career search process may exhibit important differences depending on the size of a worker?s local market. This paper explores this ...
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 ...
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
Cities and the growth of wages among young workers: evidence from the NLSY
Human capital-based theories of cities suggest that large, economically diverse urban agglomerations increase worker productivity by increasing the rate at which individuals acquire skills. One largely unexplored implication of this theory is that workers in big cities should see faster growth in their earnings over time than comparable workers in smaller markets. This paper examines this implication using data on a sample of young male workers drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort. The results suggest that earnings growth does tend to be faster in large, ...
Journal Article
Trends in neighborhood-level unemployment in the United States: 1980 to 2000
Although the average rate of unemployment across U.S. metropolitan areas declined between 1980 and 2000, the geographic concentration of the unemployed rose sharply over this period. That is, residential neighborhoods throughout the nation's metropolitan areas became increasingly divided into high- and low-unemployment areas. This paper documents this trend using data on more than 165,000 U.S. Census block groups (neighborhoods) in 361 metropolitan areas over the years 1980, 1990, and 2000; it also examines three potential explanations: (i) urban decentralization, (ii) industrial shifts and ...