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Journal Article
12 Facts about Temporary Urbanists
Urban areas seem to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts due in part to the many young professionals who have moved into central neighborhoods since the 2000s. Many of these young professionals are thought to move back out after they have started families, but the details of these migration patterns are not well-known. I analyze data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel to answer 12 questions about these temporary urbanists?those who choose to move into an urban neighborhood and spend part of their early adulthood there.
Working Paper
Is the grass really greener? Migrants' improvements in local labor market conditions and financial health
This paper documents several facts about internal migrants in the US that underlie substantial areas of economic research and policy making, but are rarely directly published. Using a large-sample, 23-year panel, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel, I estimate the distribution of changes in local labor market conditions experienced by people who move to a different labor market. Net migration favors local labor markets with lower unemployment and faster job growth, but gross flows toward weaker labor markets are almost as large as the flows toward stronger labor ...
How Much Help Do State and Local Governments Need? Updated Estimates of Revenue Losses from Pandemic Mitigation
I estimate that state and local governments have lost $141 billion of revenue from all sources in fiscal year 2020 (FY20) due to the COVID-19 mitigation shutdowns. Under three scenarios of increasing severity, I estimate that state and local governments will need to cut expenditures by between $59 billion and $350 billion in fiscal year 2021 (FY21) to offset impending loses of revenue. Some of the revenue losses can be offset by the rainy day funds that state and local governments have set aside during the expansion, but jurisdictions that lack a fiscal buffer may face painfully deep service ...
Working Paper
Internal Migration in the United States: A Comprehensive Comparative Assessment of the Consumer Credit Panel
We introduce and provide the first comprehensive comparative assessment of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) as a valuable and underutilized data set for studying internal migration within the United States. Relative to other data sources on US internal migration, the CCP permits highly detailed cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of migration, both temporally and geographically. We compare cross-sectional and longitudinal estimates of migration from the CCP to similar estimates derived from the American Community Survey, the Current Population ...
Working Paper
The effect of local housing ordinances
The housing and economic crises have exerted a strong and lingering impact on housing markets across the nation. In this paper, we assess the degree to which local anti-blight policies have infl uenced housing market outcomes following the crises. The analysis is performed for cities in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. We measure outcomes that characterize market distress and that may be influenced by local housing ordinances including foreclosure, bulk sales, flipping, vacancy, and tax delinquency. Using matching procedures on linked data containing property, loan, and transaction characteristics, we ...
Journal Article
Are Millennials with Student Loans Upwardly Mobile?
Students have been amassing ever growing levels of debt to attend college. The situation has raised concerns about whether the debt is high enough that the benefits of borrowing--in terms of students' future socioeconomic outcomes--are compromised. This Commentary investigates relationships between student debt, mobility, and upward social mobility. The findings suggest that student debts have not become so burdensome that they undo the advantages of higher skills. However, the advantages enjoyed by heavily indebted millennial students relative to nonborrowers have declined substantially from ...
Working Paper
The impact of vacant, tax-delinquent, and foreclosed property on sales prices of neighboring homes
In this empirical analysis, we estimate the impact of vacancy, neglect associated with property-tax delinquency, and foreclosures on the value of neighboring homes using parcel-level observations. Numerous studies have estimated the impact of foreclosures on neighboring properties, and these papers theorize that the foreclosure impact works partially through creating vacant and neglected homes. To our knowledge, this is only the second attempt to estimate the impact of vacancy itself and the first to estimate the impact of tax-delinquent properties on neighboring home sales. We link vacancy ...
Migrants from High-Cost, Large Metro Areas during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Their Destinations, and How Many Could Follow
This data brief presents estimates of the number of people who have already migrated from the high-cost, large population centers to lower-cost and less-populated regions during the pandemic. It also presents the potential impacts on lower-cost regions that might receive more remote workers.2 Migration away from high-cost, large metro areas did spike during the pandemic. Even if the percentage of remote workers following these recent migration patterns is small, the number of these workers may be large enough to provide other regions the opportunity to substantially grow their workforces.
Journal Article
Raising the college degree share: How nongraduates figure into it
In their search for strategies to spur economic development, one statistic civic leaders and researchers invariably use to identify the cities to emulate is the share of college graduates. That is because the college degree share of a region is highly correlated with its economic performance. But too narrow a focus on the graduates can lead to misguided policies. A more thorough analysis suggests that the reason some areas pull ahead and some fall behind in their college degree shares may be due to trends in nongraduate population growth that regional leaders either cannot or would not ...
Working Paper
Prioritization in private-activity-bond volume cap allocation
This paper proposes and tests a structural model reflecting the process of authorizing private-activity municipal bond issuance. Private-activity municipal bonds offer tax-exempt financing for programs including industrial development, utilities, low-income housing, and student loans. The Federal tax code sets annual caps on the total tax-exempt issuance within each state, so authorization becomes a scarce resource distributed via a political process. Interviews with program administrators in several states suggested the authorization process involves prioritizing categories of use, ...