Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'state'
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Viewing papers 31 through 40 of 51
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Working PaperConcording U.S. Harmonized System Categories Over Time
May 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-11
This paper: outlines an algorithm for concording U.S. ten-digit Harmonized System export and import codes over time; describes the concordances we construct for 1989 to 2004; and provides Stata code that can be used to construct similar concordances for arbitrary beginning and ending years from 1989 to 2007.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperYou Can Take it With You: Proposition 13 Tax Benefits, Residential Mobility, and Willingness to Pay for Housing Amenities
June 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-15
The endogeneity of prices has long been recognized as the main identification problem in the estimation of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for the characteristics of a given product. This issue is particularly important when estimating MWTP in the housing market, since a number of housing and neighborhood features are unobserved by the econometrician. This paper proposes the use of a well defined type of transaction costs ' moving costs generated by property tax laws - to deal with this type of omitted variable bias. California's Proposition 13 property tax law is the source of variation in transaction costs used in the empirical analysis. Beyond its fiscal consequences, Proposition 13 created a lock-in effect on housing choice because of the implicit tax break enjoyed by homeowners living in the same house for a long time. First, I provide estimates of this lock-in effect using a natural experiment created by two subsequent amendments to Proposition 13 - Propositions 60 and 90. These amendments allow households headed by an individual over the age of 55 to transfer the implicit tax benefit to a new home. I show that mobility rates of 55-year old homeowners are approximately 25% higher than those of 54 year olds. Second, all these features of the tax law are then incorporated into a household sorting model. The key insight of this model is that because of the property tax law, different potential buyers have different user costs for the same house. The exogenous property tax component of this user cost then works as an instrument for prices. I find that MWTP estimates for housing characteristics are approximately 100% upward biased when the model does not account for the price endogeneity.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEmployment that is not covered by state unemployment insurance Laws
April 2007
Working Paper Number:
tp-2007-04
View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperGeographic Redistribution of the U.S. Manufacturing and The Role of State Development Policy
March 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-06
Competition among state and local governments to lure businesses has attracted considerable interest from economists, as well as legislators and policy makers. This paper quantifies the role of plant relocations in the geographic redistribution of manufacturing employment and examines the effectiveness of state development policy. Only a few studies have looked at how manufacturing firms locate their production facilities geographically; they have used either small manufacturing samples or small geographic regions. This paper provides broader evidence of the impact of plant relocations using confidential establishment level data from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Research Database (LRD), covering the full population of manufacturing establishments in the United States over the period from 1972 to 1992. This paper finds a relatively small role for relocation in explaining the disparity of manufacturing employment growth rates across states. Moreover, it finds evidence of very weak effects of incentive programs on plant relocations.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperReallocation and Productivity Dynamics in the Appalachian Region
January 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-03
The Appalachian Region has long suffered from poor economic performance as measured over a variety of dimensions. Even as the region has improved over the last few decades, Appalachia still lags behind the nation. A growing body of empirical work has found that reallocation is pervasive in the U.S. economy and is an integral component of economic growth. Productivity growth is improved when resources are shifted from less productive establishments towards more productive establishments either through changes in existing establishments or through the births and deaths of establishments. Establishments that use new products, technologies, and production processes replace establishments that do not in a continual process of creative destruction. Using establishment-level data, this paper examines the reallocation and productivity dynamics of the Appalachian Region. The first part of the paper compares the reallocation dynamics of Appalachia to the rest of the U.S. using a newly developed establishment-level database that covers virtually the entire U.S. economy. From this analysis, it is apparent that establishment birth and death rates and job creation and destruction rates for Appalachia are consistently below those for the rest of the U.S.. The second part of the paper uses data from the Economic Censuses to determine whether the establishment and employment dynamics of the Appalachian Region are also qualitatively different (in terms of their productivity rankings) from their U.S. counterparts. It appears that the North subregion of Appalachia has reallocation and productivity dynamics that are consistent with an impeded creative destruction story.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWhat Has Been Capitalized into Property Values: Human Capital, Social Capital, or Cultural Capital?
October 2005
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.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEstablishment and Employment Dynamics in Appalachia: Evidence from the Longitudinal Business Database
December 2003
Working Paper Number:
CES-03-19
One indicator of the general economic health of a region is the rate at which new jobs are created. The newly developed Longitudinal Business Database has been used in this paper to develop a detailed portrait of establishment formation and attrition and job creation and destruction in the Appalachian Region. The foremost finding is that the pace of reallocation in Appalachia is lower than it is for the U.S.. This is evident in Appalachia's relatively lower establishment birth and death rates and job creation and destruction rates. For example, on average over the study time period, the U.S. job creation rate exceeds 45 percent, while the Appalachian job creation rate is 43 percent. Similarly, the U.S. job destruction rate is about 35 percent, while the Appalachian job destruction rate is about 33 percent. Even when controlling for other differences, job creation rates are 1.2 percentage points lower and job destruction rates are 3.4 percentage points lower in Appalachia relative to the rest of the U.S. Another indicator of the general economic health of a region is the quality of its jobs. The quality of jobs is measured in this paper by the average wage paid at the establishment. Here too there is cause for concern about the economic health of Appalachia. The analysis shows that wages are about 10 percent lower in Appalachia than in the U.S. even when controlling for differences in other characteristics across the two areas. This wage discrepancy has not narrowed over the time of the study. Moreover, new establishments have a similar wage gap. Employees at new establishments earn wages 10 percent less than at new establishments in the rest of the U.S.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperDo Tax Incentives Affect Local Economic Growth? What Mean Impacts Miss in the Analysis of Enterprise Zone Policies
September 2003
Working Paper Number:
CES-03-17
Geographically-targeted tax incentives remain popular initiatives in response to deteriorating economic conditions of urban and industrial areas. This paper exploits the exogenous variations of the U.S. state Enterprise Zone programs to estimate the impact of various incentive features on a number of dimensions of local economic growth. The econometric analysis uses plant level data to sort out growth outcomes into gross flows separately accounted for by new, existing, and vanishing businesses in the target areas. Results offer empirical evidence to support a number of specific policy recommendations and show that the impact of the incentives has more complex dynamics than those revealed by the null mean impact estimates obtained from analyzing net growth outcomes.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperRegional Income Inequality and International Trade
July 2003
Working Paper Number:
CES-03-15
International trade is frequently cited as a cause of rising income inequality between individuals and across countries. Less attention has been paid to the effects of trade on inequality across regions within countries. Trade may enhance regional inequalities due to differences in regional trade involvement and in the prices of export and import-competing goods produced in different regions. This study investigates the effects of trade on income inequality across regions in the United States. Using both structural and price-based measures of regional trade involvement, we evaluate the effects of trade on inequality within and across states, the metro and nonmetro portions of the states, and the major Census regions. Across all states and across metro and nonmetro areas, we find that trade affects inequality primarily via import and export prices. In contrast to our expectations, however, a weaker dollar '''more expensive imports and cheaper exports ''' is associated with a worsening of a state'''s position relative to other states, and greater inequality within a state. Across the Census regions, both our price and measures had significant effects, but the direction of these effects varied by region. Whereas most regions benefited from cheaper imports, states located in regions that are traditionally home to low-wage sectors, including the Southeast and South Central regions, were made relatively worse off by lower import prices and by greater orientation toward import-competing goods. Our findings reinforce notions about the uneven impacts of globalization and suggest that policy measures are needed to ensure that both the benefits and costs of international trade involvement are shared across regions.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSpecialization, Firms, and Markets: The Division of Labor Within and Between Law Firms
May 2003
Working Paper Number:
CES-03-13
What is the role of firms and markets in mediating the division of labor? This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine law firms' boundaries. We find that firms' field scope narrows as market size increases and individuals specialize, indicating that firms' boundaries reflect organizational trade-offs. Moreover, we find that whether the division of labor is mediated by firms differs systematically according to whether lawyers in a particular field are mainly involved in structuring transactions or in dispute resolution. Our evidence is consistent with hypotheses in which firms' boundaries reflect variation in the value of knowledge-sharing or in the costs of monitoring, but not in risk-sharing. Our findings show how the incentive trade-offs associated with exploiting increasing returns from specialization help lead the structure of the industry to be fragmented, but highly-skewed.View Full Paper PDF
