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Urban and Regional Migration Estimates: Will Your City Recover from the Pandemic?
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a massive change in the movement of people at both the neighborhood and the regional levels in the United States. New migration estimates will enable us to track which urban neighborhoods and metro areas are returning to their old migration patterns and where the pandemic has permanently shifted migration trends.
Working Paper
Private-activity municipal bonds: the political economy of volume cap allocation
State governments allocate authority, under a federally imposed cap, to issue tax-exempt bonds that fund ?private activities? such as industrial expansion, student loans, and low-income housing. This paper presents political economy models of the allocation process and an empirical analysis. Due to an idiosyncrasy of the tax code, the annual per capita volume cap varies widely across states. I estimate that, on average, there is an additional $0.80 per capita per year of borrowing for each additional dollar per capita of volume cap. This confirms that the cap is a binding constraint in most ...
Journal Article
Foreclosure-related vacancy rates
The national foreclosure crisis has caused there to be millions more vacancies in our housing stock than before. Vacant homes lower their community?s property values and quality of life. Neighbors and public officials know foreclosed homes sit empty for months, but precise measures of foreclosure-related vacancy are rare. Using data from Cuyahoga County, Ohio, I trace the rise and fall in the vacancy rates of homes during the 18 months following their foreclosure. Ominously, the data suggest that foreclosure may permanently scar some homes. Foreclosed homes still have higher vacancy rates ...
Urban and Regional Migration Estimates
This District Data Brief updates the figures that appeared in “Urban and Regional Migration Estimates: Will Your City Recover from the Pandemic?” with data for 2024:Q1 for all series. The first series measures net migration of people to and from the urban neighborhoods of major metro areas. The second series covers all neighborhoods but breaks down net migration to other regions by four region types: (1) high-cost metros, (2) affordable, large metros, (3) midsized metros, and (4) small metros and rural areas. The metro area definitions used here are for combined statistical areas, which ...
Journal Article
The Evolution of Household Leverage during the Recovery
Recent research has shown that geographic areas that experienced greater household deleveraging during the recession also experienced relatively severe economic contractions and slower recoveries. This analysis explores geographic variations in household debt over the past recession and recovery. It fi nds that regions that had very high household leverage at the start of the recession have shifted back toward national norms, while the variation of leverage within metro areas has maintained steady relationships with neighborhood characteristics such as location,demographics, and the age of ...
Working Paper
Financial Innovations and Issuer Sophistication in Municipal Securities Markets
When local governments default or file for bankruptcy, it is often because public officials misunderstood the risks associated with innovative financial products. If unsophisticated municipal bond issuers were to widely adopt a high risk financial product, this could harm taxpayers and investors, as well as destabilize the financial system. This analysis uses municipal bond issuers? total debt outstanding as a proxy for their sophistication and investigates the relationship between sophistication and adoption of financial innovations. Using comprehensive data on securities issued between 1992 ...
Working Paper
Industrial Composition and Intergenerational Mobility
For five decades, the share of adults employed in college-degree-intensive industries, such as health care and education, has been rising. Industries that provided employment for workers without degrees, especially manufacturing, have been reducing their payrolls. This economic transition could impact the probability of children obtaining higher levels of education than their parents achieved. In this analysis, measures of the local industrial composition from the Current Population Survey are merged with the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth using the confidential geo-coded records. ...
Working Paper
Measures beyond the college degree share to guide inter-regional comparisons and workforce development
Raising the share of adults with college degrees in a region or jurisdiction is a nearly universal goal of regional policymakers. They believe that education, as summarized by this statistic, is the cause of increasing employment, productivity, and wages. Using statistics estimated from the decennial censuses and the American Community Survey, this analysis demonstrates how different measures would suggest different rankings of more successful versus less successful metro areas. The "place-of-birth" variable in Census data enables a disaggregation of the origins of the skilled and unskilled ...
Urban and Regional Migration Estimates, Third Quarter 2023 Update
This Data Brief updates the figures that appeared in "Urban and Regional Migration Estimates: Will Your City Recover from the Pandemic?" with data for 2023 Q3 for all series. Migration estimates enable us to track which urban neighborhoods and metro areas are returning to their old migration patterns and where the pandemic has permanently shifted migration trends.
Urban and Regional Migration Estimates, Second Quarter 2023 Update
This Data Brief updates the figures that appeared in "Urban and Regional Migration Estimates: Will Your City Recover from the Pandemic?" with data for 2023 Q2 for all series. Migration estimates will enable us to track which urban neighborhoods and metro areas are returning to their old migration patterns and where the pandemic has permanently shifted migration trends.