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Essays In Labor And Urban Economics

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Essays In Labor Urban Economics

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Author : Mads Christian Hejlesen
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2020

Essays In Labor Urban Economics written by Mads Christian Hejlesen and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020 with categories.

Three Essays On Labor And Urban Economics

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Author : Mark Johnson Lewis
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2003

Three Essays On Labor And Urban Economics written by Mark Johnson Lewis and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2003 with categories.

This thesis consists of three unrelated essays in the fields of labor and urban economics. The first essay exploits the creation of a formal college system in Quebec in the late 1960's as a quasi-experiment to estimate the value of community college. Focusing on the effect of the policy on English-speaking Quebecois, the creation of the CEGEPs (Colleges of General and Vocational Education) is shown to increase schooling by about a third of a year for both men and women, without diverting students from university. Despite increasing educational attainment, estimates of the impact of CEGEP on wages are negative. Analysis suggests the negative estimates can be understood as a combination of lost labor market experience, a decrease in the return to university, and an insignificant return to CEGEP. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls and across years of data. Possible interpretations of the results are discussed. The second essay, co-authored with William Wheaton, examines the relationship between labor market agglomeration and wages. Using the 5% public use micro sample of the 1990 U.S. census, we find that observationally equivalent workers in the manufacturing sector earn higher wages when they are in urban labor markets that have a larger share of national or metropolitan employment in their same occupation and industry groups. Quantitatively, the effect is large, with an elasticity (measured at the means) of between 1.2 and 3.6 for these effects. We interpret the willingness of firms to pay more for equivalent workers in dense markets as evidence of an agglomeration economy in urban labor. The third chapter estimates the effect of employment dispersion on average commute times in American cities. Using a sample of over two hundred cities, I find that residents of cities where employment is more geographically disperse have lower average commute times than residents of cities where employment is more centralized. The results are robust to the inclusion of city fixed effects. An instrumental variables strategy is employed to try to account for potential simultaneity between changes in employment dispersion and changes in commute times.

Essays In Labor And Urban Economics

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Author : Chia-Hua (Gary) Lin
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2020

Essays In Labor And Urban Economics written by Chia-Hua (Gary) Lin and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020 with categories.

This dissertation contains three essays that examine how two prominent global trends-globalization and climate change-impact the growing spatial inequality in the United States. The first chapter, "Trade Liberalization and Skill Acquisition," focuses on how trade liberalization affects workers' skill acquisition responses. Workhorse trade models, such as the Heckscher-Ohlin model, predict that trade liberalization increases capital-abundant countries' specialization in capital-intensive sectors and creates economic incentives for workers to upgrade their skills, such as by investing in college education. In this study, I assess how a prominent U.S. trade liberalization policy affected college attainment. The empirical approach leverages geographic variation in import exposure after China obtained permanent normal trade relation status in 2000. Results show that the import shock significantly raised college enrollment, particularly at two-year colleges and public colleges. However, evidence strongly suggests that the shock did not increase college completion. One potential mechanism for the gap between college enrollment and completion is a trade-induced decline in student-oriented resources at public colleges. The second chapter, "High-Skilled Immigration and Native Task Specialization in U.S. Cities," concerns the topic of increased global economic integration through international migration. Specifically, I investigate how the influx of high-skilled immigrants affected the occupational choices of native-born workers in urban economies. Standard theory, such as the Roy model, predicts that high-skilled immigrants will self-select into math-intensive occupations in which they have a comparative advantage over native workers. To test this theory, I take advantage of the influx of college-educated immigrants in science, math, technology, and engineering (STEM) fields after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, which established temporary working visas, such as the H-1B. The estimates from an instrumental variable approach indicate that increases in foreign talent in math-intensive tasks increased the specialization of college-educated natives in social-intensive tasks. Evidence suggests that this labor reallocation occurred within occupations at the top of the task distribution. The productivity gains from task specialization accrued to both college and noncollege natives. All experienced significant positive wage gains. The findings provide suggestive evidence that cities benefit from the inflow of highly skilled immigrants through their direct contribution to the local economy (e.g., innovation) and from the increased task specialization of its workforce. In the third chapter, "Local Public Finance Dynamics in the Face of Rising Climate Risk," a joint work with Rhiannon Jerch and Matthew E. Kahn, we assess the fiscal impacts of climate-change-induced environmental shocks on local public good provision. The conventional wisdom is that cities are at increasing risk of experiencing severe climate shocks, but they are not adequately prepared for these shocks. Natural disasters, including hurricanes and floods, can exert severe budgetary pressure on local governments' ability to provide critical infrastructure, goods, and services. Yet, very little is known about the effects of these shocks on local public finance. In this paper, we show that hurricanes cause local revenues to fall significantly, and this loss of local revenue persists up to a decade after the hurricane and leads to reductions in municipal bond ratings. The connection between local revenue loss and bond ratings demonstrates that climatic shocks can exacerbate direct local fiscal pressures: cities deemed riskier by ratings agencies face higher costs of borrowing debt and thereby face constraints to investing in climate change adaptation.

Essays In Urban Economics And Local Labor Markets

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Author : Adam W. Perdue
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2012

Essays In Urban Economics And Local Labor Markets written by Adam W. Perdue and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012 with Economics categories.

Abstract: This dissertation consists of two essays exploring the often noted dispersion of economic activity within cities. Focusing in particular on the phenomenon of polycentricity, these essays explore the relationship between employment centers and spatial and economic outcomes of cities. The first essay explores the implications of two common proposed criteria for identifying an employment center. Does the area represent a local concentration of employment? Does the area affect the local population density of the city? Using data on both place of employment and place of residence, I propose a new method for testing the relationship between concentrations of employment and population density within a metropolitan area. First a recently developed statistical method is used to identify concentrations of employment using data on place of employment. Second, I propose two methods for estimating the extent of the radius of influence for an employment center, using the relationship between tract of employment and tract of residence. Third, I propose a new specification for the entrance of distance into the polycentric regression. This new specification allows the impacts of the concentrations of employments on density to be positive, following the theoretical hypothesis. I use this new specification to jointly estimate the local gradients of 21 identified concentrations of employment in the Houston metropolitan area on their local population density. I find that not all identified employment concentrations have the expected significant positive gradients, and thus do not qualify as employment centers. I also find that the estimated gradients are sensitive to estimates for the radius of influence for each employment concentration, and that the level of employment in an employment concentration, alone, is not a strong predictor of significant local impact on population density or on the size of the estimated gradient. The second essay tests for the theoretically predicted relationships between the number of employment centers in a city, and the city's transport costs and wages. Urban area vehicle miles travelled rise with an increase in the number of employment centers in an urban area, while commute times are unaffected. These findings contradict the common hypothesis that additional employment centers lower transport costs by allowing workers to live closer to work. Instead, it appears that if transport costs are falling they do so through a fall in per unit distance price. I find that urban area average wages fall with an increase in the number of employment centers. I also find that average wages increase as a larger share of employment locates within employment centers. These two findings support the belief in the presence of agglomeration economies within employment centers that increases in concentration. In a competitive equilibrium the formation of additional employment centers have externalities in both the costs and benefits, thus it is not clear if the efficient number of employment centers will be formed within an urban area. This is explored through an investigation of the determinants of the share of urban area employment that locates in employment centers. I find that the predicted employment share maximizing number of employment centers increases with urban area size.

Essays In Urban And Labor Economics

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Author : Daniel Ringo
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014

Essays In Urban And Labor Economics written by Daniel Ringo and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with College attendance categories.

"This dissertation contributes to two literatures: Urban Economics and Labor Economics. In the first chapter I estimate the effect of home ownership on individual workers' unemployment and wage growth, as well as other labor market outcomes. Because of higher moving costs, home owners will be less willing than renters to relocate for work and could therefore face longer unemployment spells. To elaborate on this hypothesis, credited to Oswald (1996), I build a simple search model and obtain a set of labor market predictions to test. The current microeconomic literature has reached mixed results regarding home ownership's impact, with most studies concluding that home ownership reduces unemployment. I show that the instruments used are likely to be invalid because of, among other reasons, Tiebout (1956) type sorting into housing markets. I use an instrumental variable free of the endogeneity present in other work: the county level home ownership rate when and where the worker grew up. This IV affects workers' preferences for housing but not, conditional on my covariates, their labor market ability. My results indicate that home ownership is a significant hindrance to mobility, and homeowners suffer longer unemployment spells and slower wage growth because of it. In the second chapter I use a dynamic model of neighborhood choice to estimate household preferences over the demographic characteristics of a neighborhood. I focus on the racial mix, average income and housing price level of a neighborhood, and whether households prefer neighbors that are similar to themselves. Identification of these preferences is complicated by the social aspect of neighborhood amenities. A household's valuation of a particular choice (neighborhood) is a function of the choices other households in the market have made and will make in the future. I show that demographic characteristics of a neighborhood are therefore endogenous to neighborhood quality. Standard estimates of preferences over neighbors may be biased by the presence of such unobservable local amenities. I develop a framework to correct this problem based on a careful delineation of the information households could have access to before and after they make their decisions. The model I build has the advantage over the literature of being able to produce self-consistent predictions about demographic changes. I deal with the low frequency of observations in my data set, the decennial census, by simulating local housing markets between data collection periods. After controlling for type-specific preferences for the physical amenities of neighborhoods, I find a universal preference for higher income neighbors. In contrast to much of the literature, my results suggest white households have no aversion to minority neighbors. In the third chapter I estimate the effect of parental credit scores on the child's probability of attending and completing college. Parents in the US are increasingly supplementing the student loans available to their children with unsecured debt in their own name. This is the first paper on this topic to make use of direct observations of credit scores, rather than rely on proxies such as wealth shocks. I find that good parental credit significantly improves the child's probability of attending college, with a smaller (although still significant) effect on the probability of completing a four-year degree. I provide evidence that the estimated relationship is causal and not biased by, for example, unobserved ability. Additionally, I show that credit scores may affect attendance through channels other than access to the student loan market. I hypothesize households substitute the potential to borrow for precautionary savings"--Pages iii-iv.

Three Essays In Labor Economics A Study Of The Modern Urban Labor Market In China

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Author : Qian Sun
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2019

Three Essays In Labor Economics A Study Of The Modern Urban Labor Market In China written by Qian Sun and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019 with categories.

"This thesis is composed of three studies that examine three different aspects of the modern urban labor market in China: State-owned Enterprises (SOE) wage premium, employment and labor mobility, and public-sector reforms. The first chapter studies the SOE wage premium in the period 1995-2013. It uses the latest data and methods to estimate the premium. Evidence suggests that SOE wage premium has diminished and become insignificant since late 1990s and estimates in previous research are biased. The second chapter studies the employment and mobility patterns in the period 2010-2014. Evidence reveals significant heterogeneity in employment and mobility outcomes between demographic and educational groups. The last chapter studies the economic consequences of counterfactual public-sector policies. It rationalizes the observed data pattern in a job search framework and quantifies the effects of counterfactual employment and wage policies in public sector on unemployment and labor income distribution in the urban areas. Simulation results suggest that changing public-sector employment rules has a smaller effect on unemployment than changing public-sector wage rules. " --