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Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'urban'

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  • Working Paper

    Associations Between Public Housing and Individual Earnings in New Orleans

    October 2015

    Authors: Sara Gleave

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-15-32

    This study uses a sample of the civilian labor force aged 16-64 constructed from the Decennial Census and American Community Survey, along with data from the HUD dataset Picture of Subsidized Households, to compare the likelihood for job earnings in relation to public housing developments in the New Orleans MSA before and after Hurricane Katrina. Results from a series of hierarchical linear models (HLM) indicate significant relationships are altered between time periods, including those from public and mixed-income developments, suggesting a fluid relationship between neighborhoods and economic outcomes during physical, demographic and economic restructuring.
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  • Working Paper

    THE URBAN DENSITY PREMIUM ACROSS ESTABLISHMENTS

    October 2014

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-14-43

    We use longitudinal microdata to estimate the urban density premium for U.S. establishments, controlling for observed establishment characteristics and dynamic establishment behavior. Consistent with previous studies, we estimate a density premium between 6 and 10 percent, even after controlling for establishment composition, local skill mix, and the endogeneity of location choice. More importantly, we find that the estimated density premium is realized almost entirely at birth and is constant over the life of establishments. We find little evidence that the endogenous entry or exit of establishments can account for any of the estimated density premium. We interpret our results as implying that the returns to agglomeration diffuse within a city through a reallocation channel rather than through an increase in the productivity of existing firms.
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  • Working Paper

    RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY ACROSS LOCAL AREAS IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF THE HEALTHY POPULATION

    February 2014

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-14-14

    Determining whether population dynamics provide competing explanations to place effects for observed geographic patterns of population health is critical for understanding health inequality. We focus on the working-age population where health disparities are greatest and analyze detailed data on residential mobility collected for the first time in the 2000 US census. Residential mobility over a 5-year period is frequent and selective, with some variation by race and gender. Even so, we find little evidence that mobility biases cross-sectional snapshots of local population health. Areas undergoing large or rapid population growth or decline may be exceptions. Overall, place of residence is an important health indicator; yet, the frequency of residential mobility raises questions of interpretation from etiological or policy perspectives, complicating simple understandings that residential exposures alone explain the association between place and health. Psychosocial stressors related to contingencies of social identity associated with being black, urban, or poor in the U.S. may also have adverse health impacts that track with structural location even with movement across residential areas.
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  • Working Paper

    DO LOCAL MANAGERS GIVE LABOR AN EDGE?

    April 2013

    Authors: Scott E. Yonker

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-13-16

    Based on the psychological theory of place attachments, native local managers should be more rooted in their communities than non-locals and should act accordingly. Consistent with this, local managers are 33% less likely to lay of employees than their non-local industry peers following industry distress. Additionally, when managers are forced to lay off employees, establishments near managers' homes are less likely to experience layoffs than those located elsewhere. Locals pay for these higher employment levels by spending cash, cutting investment, and selling assets. While there is no direct evidence that labor-friendly policies of locals have a differential impact on firm performance or value, only locals with weaker incentives implement these policies, suggesting that favoritism by locals may be suboptimal. Taken together these results suggest that managerial preferences impact corporate employment decisions.
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  • Working Paper

    Assessing the Incidence and Efficiency of a Prominent Place Based Policy

    February 2011

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-11-07

    This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. Using rejected and future applicants to the EZ program as controls, we find that EZ designation substantially increased employment in zone neighborhoods and generated wage increases for local workers without corresponding increases in population or the local cost of living. The results suggest the efficiency costs of first Round EZs were relatively small.
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  • Working Paper

    Access to Workers or Employers? An Intra-Urban Analysis of Plant Location Decisions

    September 2010

    Authors: Mark J. Kutzbach

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-10-21R

    This analysis attributes economies of agglomeration to either labor market pooling or employer-based productivity spillovers by distinguishing the effect of access to workers, measured by place-of-residence, from the effect of access to employers. New establishment location choices serve as a measure of productivity advantages, while census tract level data on access to same-industry employment, other-industry employment, and specialized workers, as well as metropolitan area fixed effects, measure sources of agglomeration and other locational characteristics. The four industries included are selected so that each relies on a workforce with a specialized occupation that is identifiable by place-of-residence, and that productivity and cost advantages are the primary drivers of location choice. The results show that both access to specialized workers and access to same-industry employers contribute to economies of agglomeration at an intra-urban spatial scale, and that the magnitude of the worker effect is large relative to employer-based productivity spillovers.
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  • Working Paper

    Mom-and-Pop Meet Big-Box: Complements or Substitutes?

    September 2009

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-09-34

    In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned (a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail establishments, several empirical studies have examined the evidence on how Big-Boxes' impact local retail employment but no clear consensus has emerged. To help shed light on this debate, we exploit establishment-level data with detailed location information from a single metropolitan area to quantify the impact of Big-Box store entry and growth on nearby single unit and local chain stores. We incorporate a rich set of controls for local retail market conditions as well as whether or not the Big-Boxes are in the same sector as the smaller stores. We find a substantial negative impact of Big-Box entry and growth on the employment growth at both single unit and especially smaller chain stores ' but only when the Big-Box activity is both in the immediate area and in the same detailed industry.
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  • Working Paper

    Crime's Impact on the Survival Prospects of Young Urban Small Businesses

    October 2007

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-07-30

    High prevailing levels of criminal activity have numerous impacts on the viability of urban small businesses and the various impacts are not uniformly negative. It is the negative impacts, however, that are most often noted. Either the perception or reality of rampant crime can scare away customers, potential employees, lending institutions, even casualty insurance underwriters. Yet, competitors may also be driven away. Operating in a high-crime area can be advantageous, on balance, for some firms. Our analysis of nearly 5,000 urban businesses started between 1986 and 1992 indicates that those most seriously impacted by crime exhibit no measureable disadvantage regarding firm size, capitalization, survival rates, or other traits, relative to firms whose owners report that crime has not impacted them negatively.
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  • Working Paper

    Resident Perceptions of Crime: How Similar are They to Official Crime Rates?

    March 2007

    Authors: John Hipp

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-07-10

    This study compares the relationship between official crime rates and residents' perceptions of crime in census tracts. Employing a unique dataset that links household level data from the American Housing Survey metro samples over a period of 25 years (1976-2000) with official crime rate data for census tracts in selected cities during selected years, this large sample provides considerable ability to generalize the findings. I find that residents' perception of crime is most strongly related to official rates of tract violent crime. Models simultaneously taking into account both violent and property crime consistently found that property crime actually has a negative effect on perceived crime. Among types of violent crime, the robbery rate is consistently related to higher levels of perceived crime in the tract, whereas it appears a structural shift occurred in the mid-1980s in which aggravated assault and murder rates now impact perceptions of crime, even when taking into account the robbery rate.
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  • Working Paper

    What Has Been Capitalized into Property Values: Human Capital, Social Capital, or Cultural Capital?

    October 2005

    Authors: Shihe Fu

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-05-25

    Urban amenities can be capitalized into land values or property values. However, little attention has been paid to the capitalization of social amenities. This paper classifies three types of social-interaction-based social amenities: human capital, social capital, and cultural capital at residential neighborhood levels. We use the restricted version of the 1990 Massachusetts Census data and estimate hedonic housing models with social amenities. The findings are as follows: (1) Human capital has significant positive effects on property values. This tests the Lucas conjecture. (2) Different types of social capital have different effects on property values: an increase in the percentage of new residents has significant positive effects on property values, probably due to the strength of weak ties. However, an increase in the percentage of single-parent households has negative effects on property values. An increase in the home ownership rate has positive effects at large geographic levels. (3) Cultural capital effects vary from high to low geographic levels, the effects of English proficiency and racial homogeneity are positive at and beyond the tract level, but insignificant at the block level. This may imply that cultural capital is more important in social interactions at large geographic scale.
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