-
Neighborhood Income and Material Hardship in the United States
January 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-01
U.S. households face a number of economic challenges that affect their well-being. In this analysis we focus on the extent to which neighborhood economic conditions contribute to hardship. Specifically, using data from the 2008 and 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation panel surveys and logistic regression, we analyze the extent to which neighborhoods income levels affect the likelihood of experiencing seven types of hardships, including trouble paying bills, medical need, food insecurity, housing hardship, ownership of basic consumer durables, neighborhood problems, and fear of crime. We find strong bivariate relationships between neighborhood income and all hardships, but for most hardships these are explained by other household characteristics, such as household income and education. However, neighborhood income retains a strong association with two hardships in particular even when controlling for a variety of other household characteristics: neighborhood conditions (such as the presence of trash and litter) and fear of crime. Our study highlights the importance of examining multiple measures when assessing well-being, and our findings are consistent with the notion that collective socialization and community-level structural features affect the likelihood that households experience deleterious neighborhood conditions and a fear of crime.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Small Business Pulse Survey Estimates by Owner Characteristics and Rural/Urban Designation
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-24
In response to requests from policymakers for additional context for Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS) measures of the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses, we researched developing estimates by owner characteristics and rural/urban locations. Leveraging geographic coding on the Business Register, we create estimates of the effect of the pandemic on small businesses by urban and rural designations. A more challenging exercise entails linking micro-level data from the SBPS with ownership data from the Annual Business Survey (ABS) to create estimates of the effect of the pandemic on small businesses by owner race, sex, ethnicity, and veteran status. Given important differences in survey design and concerns about nonresponse bias, we face significant challenges in producing estimates for owner demographics. We discuss our attempts to meet these challenges and provide discussion about caution that must be used in interpreting the results. The estimates produced for this paper are available for download. Reflecting the Census Bureau's commitment to scientific inquiry and transparency, the micro data from the SBPS will be available to qualified researchers on approved projects in the Federal Statistical Research Data Center network.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Immigration and the Demand for Urban Housing
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-23
The immigrant population has grown dramatically in the US in the last fifty years. This study estimates housing demand among immigrants and discusses how immigration may be altering the structure of US urban areas. Immigrants are found to consume less housing per capita than native born US residents.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Impacts of Opportunity Zones on Zone Residents
June 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-12
Created by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, the Opportunity Zone program was designed to encourage investment in distressed communities across the U.S. We examine the early impacts of the Opportunity Zone program on residents of targeted areas. We leverage restricted-access microdata from the American Community Survey and employ difference-in-differences and matching approaches to estimate causal reduced-form effects of the program. Our results point to modest, if any, positive effects of the Opportunity Zone program on the employment, earnings, or poverty of zone residents.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Changes in Metropolitan Area Definition, 1910-2010
February 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-04
The Census Bureau was established as a permanent agency in 1902, as industrialization and urbanization were bringing about rapid changes in American society. The years following the establishment of a permanent Census Bureau saw the first attempts at devising statistical geography for tabulating statistics for large cities and their environs. These efforts faced several challenges owing to the variation in settlement patterns, political organization, and rates of growth across the United States. The 1910 census proved to be a watershed, as the Census Bureau offered a definition of urban places, established the first census tract boundaries for tabulating data within cities, and introduced the first standardized metropolitan area definition. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Census Bureau in association with other statistical agencies had established a flexible standard metropolitan definition and a more consistent means of tabulating urban data. Since 1950, the rules for determining the cores and extent of metropolitan areas have been largely regarded as comparable. In the decades that followed, however, a number of rule changes were put into place that accounted for metropolitan complexity in differing ways, and these have been the cause of some confusion. Changes put into effect with the 2000 census represent a consensus of sorts for how to handle these issues.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Shifting of the Property Tax on Urban Renters: Evidence from New York State's Homestead Tax Option
December 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-43
In 1981, New York State enabled their cities to adopt the Homestead Tax Option (HTO), which created a multi-tiered property tax system for rental properties in New York City, Buffalo, and Rochester. The HTO enabled these municipalities to impose a higher property tax rate on rental units in buildings with four or more units, compared to rental units in buildings with three or fewer units. Using restricted-use American Housing Survey data and historical property tax rates from each of these cities, we exploit within-unit across-time variation in property tax rates and rents to estimate the degree to which property taxes are shifted onto renters in the form of higher rents. We find that property owners shift approximately 14 percent of an increase in taxes onto renters. This study is the first to use within-unit across time variation in property taxes and rents to identify this shifting effect. Our estimated effect is measurably smaller than most previous studies, which often found shifting effects of over 60 percent.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Children of HOPE VI Demolitions: National Evidence on Labor Market Outcomes
November 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-39
We combine national administrative data on earnings and participation in subsidized housing to study how the demolition of 160 public housing projects'funded by the HOPE VI program'affected the adult labor market outcomes for 18,500 children. Our empirical strategy compares children exposed to the program to children drawn from thousands of non-demolished projects, adjusting for observable differences using a flexible estimator that combines features of matching and regression. We find that children who resided in HOPE VI projects earn 14% more at age 26 relative to children in comparable non-HOPE VI projects. These earnings gains are strongest for demolitions in large cities, particularly in neighborhoods with higher pre-demolition poverty rates and lower pre-demolition job accessibility. There is no evidence that the labor market gains are driven by improvements in household or neighborhood environments that promote human capital development in children. Rather, subsequent improvements in job accessibility represent a likely pathway for the results.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-42R
We construct a publicly available atlas of children's outcomes in adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimate children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race, and gender. These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. We find that children's outcomes vary sharply across nearby tracts: for children of parents at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, the standard deviation of mean household income at age 35 is $4,200 across tracts within counties. We illustrate how these tract-level data can provide insight into how neighborhoods shape the development of human capital and support local economic policy using two applications. First, we show that the estimates permit precise targeting of policies to improve economic opportunity by uncovering specific neighborhoods where certain subgroups of children grow up to have poor outcomes. Neighborhoods matter at a very granular level: conditional on characteristics such as poverty rates in a child's own Census tract, characteristics of tracts that are one mile away have little predictive power for a child's outcomes. Our historical estimates are informative predictors of outcomes even for children growing up today because neighborhood conditions are relatively stable over time. Second, we show that the observational estimates are highly predictive of neighborhoods' causal effects, based on a comparison to data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment and a quasi-experimental research design analyzing movers' outcomes. We then identify high-opportunity neighborhoods that are affordable to low-income families, providing an input into the design of affordable housing policies. Our measures of children's long-term outcomes are only weakly correlated with traditional proxies for local economic success such as rates of job growth, showing that the conditions that create greater upward mobility are not necessarily the same as those that lead to productive labor markets.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-40R
We study the sources of racial and ethnic disparities in income using de-identified longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989-2015. We document three sets of results. First, the intergenerational persistence of disparities varies substantially across racial groups. For example, Hispanic Americans are moving up significantly in the income distribution across generations because they have relatively high rates of intergenerational income mobility. In contrast, black Americans have substantially lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to large income disparities that persist across generations. Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women. Second, differences in family characteristics such as parental marital status, education, and wealth explain very little of the black-white income gap conditional on parent income. Differences in ability also do not explain the patterns of intergenerational mobility we document. Third, the black-white gap persists even among boys who grow up in the same neighborhood. Controlling for parental income, black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. Both black and white boys have better outcomes in low-poverty areas, but black-white gaps are larger on average for boys who grow up in such neighborhoods. The few areas in which black-white gaps are relatively small tend to be low-poverty neighborhoods with low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks. Black males who move to such neighborhoods earlier in childhood earn more and are less likely to be incarcerated. However, fewer than 5% of black children grow up in such environments. These findings suggest that reducing the black-white income gap will require efforts whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Do Walmart Supercenters Improve Food Security?
June 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-31
This paper examines the effect of Walmart Supercenters, which lower food prices and expand food availability, on household and child food insecurity. Our food insecurity-related outcomes come from the 2001-2012 waves of the December Current Population Study Food Security Supplement. Using narrow geographic identifiers available in the restricted version of these data, we compute the distance between each household's census tract of residence and the nearest Walmart Supercenter. We estimate instrumental variables models that leverage the predictable geographic expansion patterns of Walmart Supercenters outward from Walmart's corporate headquarters. Results suggest that closer proximity to a Walmart Supercenter improves the food security of households and children, as measured by number of affirmative responses to a food insecurity questionnaire and an indicator for food insecurity. The effects are largest among low-income households and children, but are also sizeable for middle-income children.
View Full
Paper PDF
