This study uses census microdata from 1960 to 2010 to look at how the racial and ethnic composition of local government employees has reflected the diversity of the general population in the 100 largest metro areas over the last half century. Historically, one route to upward social mobility has been employment in local government. This study uses microdata that predates key immigration and civil rights legislation of the 1960s through to the present to examine changes in the racial and ethnic composition of local government employees and in the general population. For this study, local government employees have been divided into high- and low-wage occupations. These data indicate that local workforces have grown more diverse over time, though representation across different racial and ethnic groups and geographic areas is uneven. African-Americans were underrepresented in high-wage local government employment and overrepresented in low-wage jobs in the early years of this study, particularly in the South, but have since become proportionally represented in high-wage jobs on a national level. In contrast, the most recent data indicate that Hispanic and other races are underrepresented in this employment group, particularly in the West. Though the numbers of Hispanic and Asian high-wage local government employees are increasing, it appears that it will take several years for those groups to achieve proportional representation throughout the United States.
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Urban-Suburban Migration in the United States, 1955-2000
February 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-08
This study uses census microdata from 1960 to 2010 to look at the rates of suburbanization in the 100 largest metro areas. Looking at the racial and ethnic composition of the population, and then further breaking down these groups by income, it's clear that more affluent people were more likely to move to the suburbs. Also, the White non-Hispanic population has long been the most suburbanized group. A majority of the White population lived in suburbs by 1960 in the 100 largest metro areas, while most of the Black non-Hispanic population lived in urban core areas as late as 2000. The Hispanic and Asian populations went from majority urban to majority suburban during this period.
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Metropolitan Segregation: No Breakthrough in Sight
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-14
The 2020 Census offers new information on changes in residential segregation in metropolitan regions across the country as they continue to become more diverse. We take a long view, assessing trends since 1980 and extrapolating to the future. These new data mostly reinforce patterns that were observed a decade ago: high but slowly declining black-white segregation, and less intense but hardly changing segregation of Hispanics and Asians from whites. Enough time has passed since the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s to draw this conclusion: segregation will continue to divide Americans well into the 21st Century.
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Applying Current Core Based Statistical Area Standards to Historical Census Data, 1940-2020
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-10
In the middle of the twentieth century, the Bureau of the Budget, in conjunction with the Census Bureau and other federal statistical agencies, introduced a widely used unit of statistical geography, the county-based Standard Metropolitan Area. Metropolitan definitions since then have been generally regarded as comparable, but methodological changes have resulted in comparability issues, particularly among the largest and most complex metro areas. With the 2000 census came an effort to simplify the rules for defining metro areas. This study attempts to gather all available historical geographic and commuting data to apply the current rules for defining metro areas to create comparable statistical geography covering the period from 1940 to 2020. The changes that accompanied the 2000 census also brought a new category, "Micropolitan Statistical Areas," which established a metro hierarchy. This research expands on this approach, using a more elaborate hierarchy based on the size of urban cores. The areas as delineated in this paper provide a consistent set of statistical geography that can be used in a wide variety of applications.
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Adjusting imperfect data: overview and case studies
November 2004
Working Paper Number:
tp-2004-05
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Do Conglomerate Firms Allocate Resources Inefficiently?
February 1999
Working Paper Number:
CES-99-11
We develop a profit-maximizing neoclassical of optimal firm size and growth across different industries. The model predicts how conglomerate firms will allocate resources across divisions over the business cycle and how their responses to industry shocks will differ from those of single-segment firms. We test our model and find that growth of conglomerate and single-segment firms is related to neoclassical theory. Conglomerates grow less in a particular segment of their other segments are more productive and if their other segments experience a larger positive demand shock. We find that the growth rates of peripheral segments are very sensitive to relative productivity and that conglomerates sharply cut the growth of unproductive peripheral segments. We do find some evidence consistent with agency problems for conglomerate firms that are broken up. However, the majority of conglomerate firms exhibit growth across business segments that is consistent with optimal behavior.
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Optimal Firm Size and the Growth of Conglomerate and Single-Industry Firms
October 1998
Working Paper Number:
CES-98-14
We develop a profit-maximizing neoclassical model of optimal firm size and growth across different industries based on differences in industry fundamentals and firm productivity. The model predicts how conglomerate firms will allocate resources across divisions over the business cycle and how their responses to industry shocks will differ from those of single-segment firms. We test our model and find that growth of conglomerate and single-segment firms is related to fundamental industry factors and individual firm-segment productivity suggested by our simple neoclassical theory. Conglomerates grow less in a particular segment if their other segments are more productive and if their other segments experience a larger positve demand shock. We find that the growth rates of peripheral segments are very sensitive to relative productivity an that conglomerate sharply cut the growth of unproductive peripheral segments. We do find some evidence consistent with agency problems for conglomerate firms that are broken up. However, the majority of conglomerate firms exhibit growth across business segments that is consistent with optimal behavior.
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Further Evidence from Census 2000 About Earnings by Detailed Occupation for Men and Women: The Role of Race and Hispanic Origin
November 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-37
A 2004 report by the author reviewed data from Census 2000 and concluded "There is a substantial gap in median earnings between men and women that is unexplained, even after controlling for work experience (to the extent it can be represented by age and presence of children), education, and occupation." This paper extends the analysis and concludes that once those characteristics are controlled for, no further explanatory power is attributable to race or Hispanic origin.
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The Business Dynamics Statistics: Describing the Evolution of the U.S. Economy from 1978-2019
October 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-33
The U.S. Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) provide annual measures of how many businesses begin, end, or continue their operations and the associated job creation and destruction. The BDS is a valuable resource for information on the U.S. economy because of its long time series (1978-2019), its complete coverage (all private sector, non-farm U.S. businesses), and its tabulations for both individual establishments and the firms that own and control them. In this paper, we use the publicly available BDS data to describe the dynamics of the economy over the past 40 years. We highlight the increasing concentration of employment at old and large firms and describe net job creation trends in the manufacturing, retail, information, food/accommodations, and healthcare industry sectors. We show how the spatial distribution of employment has changed, first moving away from the largest cities and then back again. Finally, we show long-run trends for a group of industries we classify as high-tech and explore how the share of employment at small and young firms has changed for this part of the economy.
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The Market for Corporate Assets: Who Engages in Mergers and Asset Sales and are there Efficiency Gains?
September 1999
Working Paper Number:
CES-99-12
We analyze the market for firms, divisions, and plants of manufacturing firms using a large sample of plant-level data for the period 1974-92. There is an active market for corporate assets, with over 7 percent of plants transacted through mergers and asset sales in expansion years in the economy. Transactions through partial firm sales represent more than half of these transactions. The probability of asset sales and full firm transactions is related to firm organization and buyer and seller ex ante productivity. We find that these transactions result in ex post productivity increases especially for asset sales from peripheral divisions of selling firms to main divisions of other buyers. Finally we find that productivity increases are significantly higher the more productive the buying firm. This timing of sales and the pattern of productivity gains suggests that the transactions that occur, especially through asset sales of plants and divisions, tend to improve the allocation of resources and are consistent with a simple neoclassic model of profit maximizing by firms. The decision to participate in the market for corporate assets and the subsequent gains realized from transactions are affected both by firm productivity and firm organization.
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Measuring Productivity Dynamics with Endogenous Choice of Technology and Capacity Utilization: An Application to Automobile Assembly
December 2000
Working Paper Number:
CES-00-16
During the 1980s, all Japanese automobile producers opened assembly plants in North America. Industry analysts and previous research claim that these transplants are more productive than incumbent plants and that they produce with a substantially different production process. We compare the two production processes by estimating a model that allows for heterogeneity in technology and productivity. We treat both types of heterogeneity as intrinsically unobservable. In the model, plants choose technology before production starts. They condition subsequent input decisions on this choice. Maximum likelihood estimation is used to estimate the unconditional distribution of the technology choice, output, and inputs. The model is applied to a sample of automobile assembly plants. We control for capacity utilization, unobserved productivity differences, and price effects. The results indicate that there exist two distinct technologies. In particular, the more recent technology uses labor less intensively and it has a higher elasticity of substitution between labor and capital. Hicks-neutral productivity growth is estimated to be lower, while capital-biased (labor-saving) productivity growth is estimated significantly higher, for the new technology. Using the estimation results, we decompose industry-wide productivity growth in plant-level changes and composition effects, for both technologies separately. Plant-level productivity growth is further decomposed to reveal the importance of capital-biased productivity growth, increase in capital-labor ratio, and returns to scale.
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