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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 ...
Journal Article
Employment trends vary in three of Missouri's metro areas
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
Technology and industrial agglomeration: evidence from computer usage
Although the association between industrial agglomeration and productivity has been widely examined and documented, little work has explored the possibility that these `external' productivity shifts are the product of more advanced technologies. This paper offers a look at this hypothesis using data on individual-level computer usage across a sample of U.S. metropolitan areas over the years 1984, 1989, 1993, and 1997. The results indicate that, for a wide array of industries at the two-, three-, and four-digit SIC level, an industry's scale within a metropolitan area is positively associated ...
Journal Article
Changing trends in the labor force: a survey
The composition of the American workforce has changed dramatically over the past half century as a result of both the emergence of married women as a substantial component of the labor force and an increase in the number of minority workers. The aging of the population has contributed to this change as well. In this paper, the authors review the evidence of changing labor force participation rates, estimate the trends in labor force participation over the past 50 years, and find that aggregate participation has stabilized after a period of persistent increases. Moreover, they examine the ...
Working Paper
Human capital growth in a cross section of U.S. metropolitan areas
Human capital 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, defined as the change in a city*s rate of college completion: population and the existing stock of college-educated labor. Given that ...
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 ...
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
Job flows and productivity dynamics: evidence from U.S. manufacturing
Through their influence on the cross-sectional distribution of productivity across firms and workers, job creation and destruction likely have an impact on the rate at which aggregate productivity changes over time. However, the nature of this effect is not, a priori, clear. While a broad consensus has emerged suggesting that job destruction enhances productivity by eliminating inefficient production units, theories disagree with regard to the effect of job creation. In particular, 'vintage-capital' theories of creative destruction suggest a positive influence since job flows are conjectured ...