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Working Paper
The Local Origins of Business Formation
What locations generate more business ideas, and where are ideas more likely to turn into businesses? Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications, we analyze the spatial disparity in the creation of business ideas and the formation of new employer startups from these ideas. Startups per capita exhibit enormous variation across granular units of geography. We decompose this variation into variation in ideas per capita and in their rate of transition to startups, and we find that both components matter. Observable local demographic, economic, financial, and business ...
Report
The home market, trade, and industrial structure
Does national market size matter for industrial structure? This has been suggested by theoretical work on "home market" effects, as in Krugman (1980, 1995). In this paper, I show that what previously was regarded as an assumption of convenience ? transport costs only for the differentiated goods ? matters a great deal. In a focal case in which differentiated and homogeneous goods have identical transport costs, the home market effect disappears. The paper discusses available evidence on the relative trade costs for differentiated and homogeneous goods. No compelling argument is found that ...
Working Paper
Recent Employment Growth in Cities, Suburbs, and Rural Communities
This paper uses a comprehensive source of yearly data to study private-sector labor demand across US counties during the past five decades. Our focus is on how employment levels and earnings relate to population density—that is, how labor markets in rural areas, suburbs, and cities have fared relative to one another. Three broad lessons emerge. First, the longstanding suburbanization of employment and population in cities with very dense urban cores essentially stopped in the first decade of the 21st century. For cities with less dense cores, however, the decentralization of employment ...
Working Paper
The Geography of Business Dynamism and Skill-Biased Technical Change
This paper shows that the growing disparities between big and small cities in the U.S. since 1980 can be explained by firms endogenously responding to a skill-biased technology shock. With the introduction of a new skill-biased technology that is high fixed cost but low marginal cost, firms endogenously adopt more in big cities, cities that offer abundant amenities for high-skilled workers, and cities that are more productive in using high-skilled labor. In cities with more adoption, small and unproductive firms are more likely to exit the market, increasing the equilibrium rate of turnover ...
Journal Article
The Shifting Expectations for Work from Home
As COVID-19 moves to an endemic state, employers have brought workers back to the office. Many workers prefer to continue working from home a portion of time, resulting in a gap between employee preferences for work from home and employer plans. Knowing who currently works from home a larger share of time and where this gap is narrowest across worker characteristics and locations helps explain where and for whom work from home is most likely to remain a permanent feature in the labor market.Using a relatively new data source, the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, Jason P. Brown ...
Journal Article
Local Origins of Business Formation
Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications, we find that startups per capita exhibit enormous variation across counties and tracts in the United States. We decompose this spatial variation into two components: variation in business ideas per capita and in their rate of transition to startups. Both components matter for the variation in startups per capita. Furthermore, local demographic, economic, financial, and business conditions account for a significant fraction of the variation in startups per capita and in its components. In particular, income, education, age, and ...
Working Paper
Floating Population: Migration With(Out) Family and the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity
This paper argues that migrants’ decision to bring their dependent family members shapes their consumption behavior, their choice of destination, and their sensitivity to migration barriers. We document that in China: (i) rural migrants disproportionately move to expensive cities; (ii) in these cities they live without their family and in poorer housing conditions; and (iii) they remit more, especially when living without their family. We then develop a quantitative general equilibrium spatial model in which migrant households choose whether, how (with or without their family), and where to ...
Newsletter
Tracking Economic Underperformance in Counties Across the U.S. and Seventh District States
In this article, I estimate that 80% of the population of the five states of the Seventh Federal Reserve District lives in a county that trailed the nation’s cumulative growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) and employment from near the start of the twenty-first century through 2023. Further analysis of counties’ relative economic performance suggests that the Seventh District states are unique: They have elevated shares of people living in counties that trail the nation in real GDP and employment growth; they experience more lackluster growth; and their underperforming counties ...
Working Paper
The Geography of Business Dynamism and Skill Biased Technical Change
This paper shows that the growing regional disparities in the U.S. since 1980 can be explained by firms endogenously responding to a skill-biased technology shock. With the introduction of a new skill-biased technology that is high fixed cost but low marginal cost, firms endogenously adopt more in big cities, cities that offer abundant amenities for high-skilled workers, and cities that are more productive in using high-skilled labor. In cities with more adoption, small and unproductive firms are more likely to exit the market, increasing the equilibrium rate of turnover or business ...
Working Paper
The Geography of Business Dynamism and Skill-Biased Technical Change
This paper shows that the growing disparities between big and small cities in the U.S. since 1980 can be explained by firms endogenously responding to a skill-biased technology shock. With the introduction of a new skill-biased technology that is high fixed cost but low marginal cost, firms endogenously adopt more in big cities, cities that offer abundant amenities for high-skilled workers, and cities that are more productive in using high-skilled labor. In cities with more adoption, small and unproductive firms are more likely to exit the market, increasing the equilibrium rate of turnover ...