CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Estimating the Local Productivity Spillovers from Science

January 2017

Abstract

Document Tags and Keywords

Similar Working Papers Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural network model know as Doc2Vec.

Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers. Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.

The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Estimating the Local Productivity Spillovers from Science' are listed below in order of similarity.

• Working Paper

  
  
  Spillovers from Immigrant Diversity in Cities
  

  November 2015

  Authors: Thomas Kemeny, Abigail Cooke

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-15-37

  Using comprehensive longitudinal matched employer-employee data for the U.S., this paper provides new evidence on the relationship between productivity and immigration spawned urban diversity. Existing empirical work has uncovered a robust positive correlation between productivity and immigrant diversity, supporting theory suggesting that diversity acts as a local public good that makes workers more productive by enlarging the pool of knowledge available to them, as well as by fostering opportunities for them to recombine ideas to generate novelty. This paper makes several empirical and conceptual contributions. First, it improves on existing empirical work by addressing various sources of potential bias, especially from unobserved heterogeneity among individuals, work establishments, and cities. Second, it augments identification by using longitudinal data that permits examination of how diversity and productivity co-move. Third, the paper seeks to reveal whether diversity acts upon productivity chiefly at the scale of the city or the workplace. Findings confirm that urban immigrant diversity produces positive and nontrivial spillovers for U.S. workers. This social return represents a distinct channel through which immigration generates broad-based economic benefits.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Immigrant Diversity and Complex Problem Solving
  

  January 2016

  Authors: Thomas Kemeny, Abigail Cooke

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-16-04

  In the growing literature exploring the links between immigrant diversity and worker productivity, recent evidence strongly suggests that diversity generates productivity improvements. However, even the most careful extant empirical work remains at some remove from the mechanisms that theory says underlie this relationship: interpersonal interaction in the service of complex problem solving. This paper aims to `stress-test' these theoretical foundations, by observing how the relationship between diversity and productivity varies across workers differently engaged in complex problem solving and interaction. Using a uniquely comprehensive matched employer-employee dataset for the United States between 1991 and 2008, this paper shows that growing immigrant diversity inside cities and workplaces offers much stronger benefits for workers intensively engaged in various forms of complex problem solving, including tasks involving high levels of innovation, creativity, and STEM. Moreover, such effects are considerably stronger for those whose work requires high levels of both problem solving and interaction.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  University Innovation, Local Economic Growth, and Entrepreneurship
  

  June 2012

  Authors: Naomi Hausman

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-12-10

  Universities, often situated at the center of innovative clusters, are believed to be important drivers of local economic growth. This paper identifies the extent to which U.S. universities stimulate nearby economic activity using the interaction of a national shock to the spread of innovation from universities - the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 - with pre-determined variation both within a university in academic strengths and across universities in federal research funding. Using longitudinal establishment-level data from the Census, I find that longrun employment and payroll per worker around universities rise particularly rapidly after Bayh-Dole in industries more closely related to local university innovative strengths. The impact of university innovation increases with geographic proximity to the university. Counties surrounding universities that received more pre-Bayh-Dole federal funding - particularly from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health - experienced faster employment growth after the law. Entering establishments - in particular multi-unit firm expansions - over the period from 1977 to 1997 were especially important in generating long-run employment growth, while incumbents experienced modest declines, consistent with creative destruction. Suggestive of their complementarities with universities, large establishments contributed more substantially to the total 20-year growth effect than did small establishments.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Urban Immigrant Diversity and Inclusive Institutions
  

  January 2016

  Authors: Thomas Kemeny, Abigail Cooke

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-16-07

  Recent evidence suggests that rising immigrant diversity in cities offers economic benefits, including improved innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity. One potentially important but underexplored dimension of this relationship is how local institutional context shapes the benefits firms and workers receive from the diversity in their midst. Theory suggests that institutions can make it less costly for diverse workers to transact, thereby catalyzing the latent bene ts of heterogeneity. This paper tests the hypothesis that the effects of immigrant diversity on productivity will be stronger in locations featuring more 'inclusive" institutions. It leverages comprehensive longitudinal linked employer-employee data for the U.S. and two distinct measures of inclusive institutions at the metropolitan area level: social capital and pro- or anti-immigrant ordinances. Findings confirm the importance of institutional context: in cities with low levels of inclusive institutions, the benefits of diversity are modest and in some cases statistically insignificant; in cities with high levels of inclusive institutions, the benefits of immigrant diversity are positive, significant, and substantial. Moreover, natives residing in cities that have enacted laws restricting immigrants enjoy no diversity spillovers whatsoever, while immigrants in these cities continue to receive a diversity bonus. These results confirm the economic significance of urban immigrant diversity, while suggesting the importance of local social and economic institutions.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  The Effects of Eviction on Children
  

  May 2025

  Authors: Daniel Tannenbaum, Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas Mader, Winnie van Dijk, Deniz Dutz

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-25-34

  Eviction may be an important channel for the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and concerns about its effects on children are often raised as a rationale for tenant protection policies. We study how eviction impacts children's home environment, school engagement, educational achievement, and high school completion by assembling new data sets linking eviction court records in Chicago and New York to administrative public school records and restricted Census records. To disentangle the consequences of eviction from the effects of correlated sources of economic distress, we use a research design based on the random assignment of court cases to judges who vary in their leniency. We find that eviction increases children's residential mobility, homelessness, and likelihood of doubling up with grandparents or other adults. Eviction also disrupts school engagement, causing increased absences and school changes. While we find little impact on elementary and middle school test scores, eviction substantially reduces high school course credits. Lastly, we find that eviction reduces high school graduation and use a novel bounding method to show that this finding is not driven by differential attrition. The disruptive effects of eviction appear worse for older children and boys. Our evidence suggests that the impact of eviction on children runs through the disruption to the home environment or school engagement rather than deterioration in school or neighborhood quality, and may be moderated by access to family support networks.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Measuring the Characteristics and Employment Dynamics of U.S. Inventors
  

  September 2022

  Authors: Ufuk Akcigit, Nathan Goldschlag

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-22-43

  Innovation is a key driver of long run economic growth. Studying innovation requires a clear view of the characteristics and behavior of the individuals that create new ideas. A general lack of rich, large-scale data has constrained such analyses. We address this by introducing a new dataset linking patent inventors to survey, census, and administrative microdata at the U.S. Census Bureau. We use this data to provide a first look at the demographic characteristics, employer characteristics, earnings, and employment dynamics of inventors. These linkages, which will be available to researchers with approved access, dramatically increases the scope of what can be learned about inventors and innovative activity.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Every Breath You Take, Every Dollar You'll Make: The Long-Term Consequences of the Clean Air Act of 1970
  

  September 2013

  Authors: Reed Walker, Adam Isen, Maya Rossin-Slater

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-13-52

  This paper examines the long-term impacts of in-utero and early childhood exposure to ambient air pollution on adult labor market outcomes. We take advantage of a new administrative data set that is uniquely suited for addressing this question because it combines information on individuals' quarterly earnings together with their counties and dates of birth. We use the sharp changes in ambient air pollution concentrations driven by the implementation of the 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments as a source of identifying variation, and we compare cohorts born in counties that experienced large changes in total suspended particulate (TSP) exposure to cohorts born in counties that had minimal or no changes. We nd a signi cant relationship between TSP exposure in the year of birth and adult labor market outcomes. A 10 unit decrease in TSP in the year of birth is associated with a 1 percent increase in annual earnings for workers aged 29-31. Most, but not all, of this effect is driven by an increase in labor force participation. In present value, the gains from being born into a county affected by the 1970 Clean Air Act amount to about $4,300 in lifetime income for the 1.5 million individuals born into these counties each year.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Who Gains from Creative Destruction? Evidence from High-Quality Entrepreneurship in the United States
  

  October 2019

  Authors: John Voorheis, Astrid Marinoni

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-19-29

  The question of who gains from high-quality entrepreneurship is crucial to understanding whether investments in incubating potentially innovative start-up firms will produce socially beneficial outcomes. We attempt to bring new evidence to this question by combining new aggregate measures of local area income inequality and income mobility with measures of entrepreneurship from Guzman and Stern (2017). Our new aggregate measures are generated by linking American Community Survey data with the universe of IRS 1040 tax returns. In both fixed effects and IV models using a Bartik-style instrument, we find that entrepreneurship increases income inequality. Further, we find that this increase in income inequality arises due to the fact that almost all of the individual gains associated with increased entrepreneurship accrue to the top 10 percent of the income distribution. While we find mixed evidence for small positive effects of entrepreneurship lower on the income distribution, we find little if any evidence that entrepreneurship increases income mobility.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Smart Cafe Cities: Testing Human Capital Externalities in the Boston Metropolitan Area
  

  October 2005

  Authors: Shihe Fu

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-05-24

  Existing studies have explored either only one or two of the mechanisms that human capital externalities percolate at only macrogeographic levels. This paper uses the 1990 Massachusetts Census data and tests four mechanisms at the microgeographic levels in the Boston metropolitan area labor market. We propose that individual workers can learn from their occupational and industrial peers in the same local labor market through four channels: depth of human capital stock, Marshallian labor market externalities, Jacobs labor market externalities, and thickness of the local labor market. We find that all types of human capital externalities are significant across Census blocks. Different types of externalities attenuate at different speeds over distances. For example, the effect of human capital depth decays rapidly beyond three miles away from block centroid. We conclude that knowledge spillovers are very localized within microgeographic scope in cities that we call Smart Caf' Cities.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Consequences of the Clean Water Act and the Demand for Water Quality
  

  January 2017

  Authors: Joseph S. Shapiro, David A. Keiser

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-17-07

  Since the 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act, government and industry have invested over $1 trillion to abate water pollution, or $100 per person-year. Over half of U.S. stream and river miles, however, still violate pollution standards. We use the most comprehensive set of files ever compiled on water pollution and its determinants, including 50 million pollution readings from 170,000 monitoring sites, to study water pollution's trends, causes, and welfare consequences. We have three main findings. First, water pollution concentrations have fallen substantially since 1972, though were declining at faster rates before then. Second, the Clean Water Act's grants to municipal wastewater treatment plants caused some of these declines. Third, the grants' estimated effects on housing values are generally smaller than the grants' costs.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---