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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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HUMAN CAPITAL TRAPS? ENCLAVE EFFECTS USING LINKED EMPLOYER-HOUSEHOLD DATA
June 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-29
This study uses linked employer-household data to measure the impact of immigrant social networks, as identified via neighborhood and workplace affiliation, on immigrant earnings. Though ethnic enclaves can provide economic opportunities through job creation and job matching, they can also stifle the assimilation process by limiting interactions between enclave members and non-members. I find that higher residential and workplace ethnic clustering among immigrants is consistently correlated with lower earnings. For immigrants with a high school education or less, these correlations are primarily due to negative self-selection. On the other hand, self-selection fails to explain the lower earnings associated with higher ethnic clustering for immigrants with post-secondary schooling. The evidence suggests that co-ethnic clustering has no discernible effect on the earnings of immigrants with lower education, but may be leading to human capital traps for immigrants who have more than a high school education.
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DO LOCAL MANAGERS GIVE LABOR AN EDGE?
April 2013
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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DO HOUSING PRICES REFLECT ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH RISKS? EVIDENCE FROM MORE THAN 1600 TOXIC PLANT OPENINGS AND CLOSINGS
April 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-14
A ubiquitous and largely unquestioned assumption in studies of housing markets is that there is perfect information about local amenities. This paper measures the housing market and health impacts of 1,600 openings and closings of industrial plants that emit toxic pollutants. We find that housing values within one mile decrease by 1.5 percent when plants open, and increase by 1.5 percent when plants close. This implies an aggregate loss in housing values per plant of about $1.5 million. While the housing value impacts are concentrated within ' mile, we find statistically significant infant health impacts up to one mile away.
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Small Homes, Public Schools, and Property Tax Capitalization
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-04
Efforts to estimate the degree to which local property taxes are capitalized into house values are complicated by any spurious correlation between property taxes and unobserved public services. One public service of particular interest is the provision of local public schools. Not only do public schools bulk large in the local property tax bill, but the inherent difficulty in measuring school quality has potentially undermined earlier attempts at achieving unbiased estimates of property tax capitalization. This particular problem has been of special concern since Oates' (1969) seminal paper. We sidestep the problem of omitted or misspecified measures of school quality by focusing on a segment of the housing market that likely places little-to-no value on school quality: small homes. Because few households residing in small homes have public school children, we anticipate that variations in their value does not account for differentials in public school quality. Using restricted-access microdata provided by the U.S. Census, and a quasi- experimental identification strategy, we estimate that local property taxes are nearly fully capitalized into the prices of small homes.
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Childhood Housing and Adult Earnings: A Between-Siblings Analysis of Housing Vouchers and Public Housing
January 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-48RR
To date, research on the long-term effects of childhood participation in voucher-assisted and public housing has been limited by the lack of data and suitable identification strategies. We create a national level longitudinal data set that enables us to analyze how children's housing experiences affect adult earnings and incarceration rates. While naive estimates suggest there are substantial negative consequences to childhood participation in voucher assisted and public housing, this result appears to be driven largely by selection of households into housing assistance programs. To mitigate this source of bias, we employ household fixed-effects specifications that use only within-household (across-sibling) variation for identification. Compared to naive specifications, household fixed-effects estimates for earnings are universally more positive, and they suggest that there are positive and statistically significant benefits from childhood residence in assisted housing on young adult earnings for nearly all demographic groups. Childhood participation in assisted housing also reduces the likelihood of incarceration across all household race/ethnicity groups. Time spent in voucher-assisted or public housing is especially beneficial for females from non-Hispanic Black households, who experience substantial increases in expected earnings and lower incarceration rates.
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Do Labor Market Networks Have An Important Spatial Dimension?
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-30
We test for evidence of spatial, residence-based labor market networks. Turnover is lower for workers more connected to their neighbors generally and more connected to neighbors of the same race or ethnic group. Both results are consistent with networks producing better job matches, while the latter could also reflect preferences for working with neighbors of the same race or ethnicity. For earnings, we find a robust positive effect of the overall residence-based network measure, whereas we usually find a negative effect of the same-group measure, suggesting that the overall network measure reflects productivity enhancing positive network effects, while the same-group measure captures a non-wage amenity.
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The Dynamics of House Price Capitalization and Locational Sorting: Evidence from Air Quality Changes
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-22
Despite extensive use of housing data to reveal valuation of non-market goods, the process of house price capitalization remains vague. Using the restricted access American Housing Survey, a high-frequency panel of prices, turnover, and occupant characteristics, this paper examines the time path of capitalization and preference-based sorting in response to air quality changes caused by differential regulatory pressure from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. The results demonstrate that owner-occupied units capitalize changes immediately, whereas rent capitalization lags. The delayed but sharp rent capitalization temporally coincides with evidence of sorting, suggesting a strong link between location choices and price dynamics.
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The Location of Displaced New Orleans Residents in the Year After Hurricane Katrina
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-19
Using individual data from the restricted version of the American Community Survey, we examined the displacement locations of pre-Katrina adult residents of New Orleans in the year after the hurricane. Over half (53%) of adults had returned to'or remained in'the New Orleans metropolitan area, with just under one-third of the total returning to the dwelling in which they resided prior to Katrina. Among the remainder, Texas was the leading location with almost 40% of those living away from the metropolitan area (18% of the total), followed by other locations in Louisiana (12%), the South region of the US other than Louisiana and Texas (12%), and elsewhere in the U.S. (5%). Black adults were considerably more likely than nonblack adults to be living elsewhere in Louisiana, in Texas, and elsewhere in the South. The observed race disparity was not accounted for by any of the demographic or socioeconomic covariates in the multinomial logistic regression models. Consistent with hypothesized effects, we found that young adults (25'39 years of age) were more likely to move further away from New Orleans and that adults born outside Louisiana were substantially more likely to have relocated away from the state.
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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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