This paper considers the effects of the local human capital level and the presence of higher education institutions on the quality of life in U.S. metropolitan areas. The local human capital level is measured by the share of adults with a college degree, and the relative importance of higher education institutions is measured by the share of the population enrolled in college. This paper finds that quality of life is positively affected by both the local human capital level and the relative importance of higher education institutions. Furthermore. these effects persist when these two measures are considered simultaneously, even though the two are highly correlated. That is the human capital stock and higher education institutions have a shared effect and also separate effects on quality of life. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Africa has recently experienced dramatic urban growth. I argue that stan- dard theories of structural transformation cannot account for this result, as it was not driven by a green revolution or an industrial revolution but by natural resource exports. I develop a new structural transformation model in which the Engel curve implies that resource windfalls are disproportionately spent on urban goods and services. This drives urbanization through the rise of “consumption cities”. I then show that cocoa booms have led to in- creased urbanization in Ghana and Ivory Coast using decadal district panel data covering more than one hundred years. As an identification strategy, I use the fact that the location of cocoa production has shifted over time for exogenous reasons: (i) for agronomic reasons, farmers deforest a new area every 25 years, and (ii) for historical reasons, the cocoa frontier has started in the South-East and shifted westward in each country. I find that cities boom in newly producing districts and persist in old ones. I document how these cities arise as a result of rural-urban consumption linkages. I discuss how this type of agglomeration can then impact economic growth.

The policy focus report series is published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to address timely public policy issues relating to land use, land markets, and property taxation. Each report is designed to bridge the gap between theory and practice by combining research findings, case studies, and contributions from scholars in a variety of academic disciplines, and from professional practitioners, local officials, and citizens in diverse communities.

The analysis of geographically referenced sociodemographic data often requires the use of data collected at different spatial scales and/or different temporal resolutions. In addition, population data that are collected at one spatial resolution may be unsuitable for a particular research project, and these data must be redistributed to different spatial units of analysis. Researchers must overcome these challenges by employing a variety of areal interpolation techniques to make the data spatially compatible. Dasymetric mapping techniques have been demonstrated to be one means through which this can be achieved successfully. We provide an overview of areal interpolation techniques with an emphasis on dasymetric mapping. We illustrate an example in which population estimates and sociodemographic data are derived for different spatial units by employing dasymetric mapping methods that rely upon ancillary data from a variety of sources, including remotely sensed satellite imagery.

A key issue surrounding employer benefit mandates is the incidence on workers through wages and employment. In this paper, we address this question using a pay-or-play policy implemented in San Francisco in 2008 that requires employers to either provide health benefits or contribute to a public option health plan. We estimate the impact on employment and earnings for the private sector overall,as well as for high impact sectors: retail and accommodation and food services. We develop a novelapproach for individual case studies by combining both spatial discontinuity in policies and permutation-typeinference using other MSAs. We find that, compared to control counties, employment and earnings patterns in San Francisco did not change appreciably following the policy. This was true for industries most affected by the mandate, as well as for overall private sector employment. The results are generally robust to inclusion of different control groups, county-specific time trends, and varying pre-periods. In contrast to the small effects on the labor market, we do find that about 25% of surveyed restaurantsimposed customer surcharges, with the median surcharge being 4% of the bill. These results indicate that while little of the burden of the mandate fell on San Francisco workers, approximately half of the incidence of the mandate fell on consumers.

This paper examines the relationship between the entry of the baby boom into the workforce and the productivity slowdown. Lucas (Bell J Econ 9(2):508523, 1978) shows how management quality plays a role in determining output. The baby booms entry into the workforce resulted in more managers from smaller, pre-baby boom cohorts. These marginal managers were necessarily of lower quality, leading to a drop in total factor productivity. As the boomers aged, this effect was reversed. A calibrated model of managers, workers, and firms suggests that the management effects of the baby boom may explain roughly 20% of the observed productivity slowdown and resurgence.

The Current Population Survey (CPS) and American Community Survey (ACS) are based on complex samples. As such, variance and standard error estimates need to be adjusted. Assuming a simple random sample (SRS) (the default of most statistical packages) will result in biased standard errors and statistical tests of significance. We describe and evaluate alternative variance estimation methods that accommodate sample design complexity. Using successive difference replication (SDR) as a gold-standard we evaluate various alternatives including a Taylor series (TS) approach, Census Bureau variance parameters, and the SRS method. For most variables considered, in both surveys and across geographic domains, the TS preformed better than design factor method. These results show that analysts wishing to avoid the cumbersome computation of design factor based standard errors can use a Taylor Series approach based on publically available geographic variables.

I analyze the characteristics of Puerto Rican migrants and non-migrants to make two contributions to existing literature: (1) The empirical analysis demonstrates that contrary to previous studies done on only working men, the 1990 data inclusive of women and non-working individuals actually support a positive self-selection in which highly skilled Puerto Ricans migrate to the U.S. The 2000 results, however, do provide strong support for negative self-selection in which the less skilled migrate. (2) The predicted, counterfactual wages for migrant and non-migrant counterparts reveal that wage differentials are not the only consideration in their decision to migrate.

We study the distributed privacy preserving data collection problem: an untrusted data collector (e.g., a medical research institute) wishes to collect data (e.g., medical records) from a group of respondents (e.g., patients). Each respondent owns a multi-attributed record which contains both non-sensitive (e.g., quasi-identifiers) and sensitive information (e.g., a particular disease), and submits it to the data collector. Assuming T is the table formed by all the respondent data records, we say that the data collection process is privacy preserving if it allows the data collector to obtain a k-anonymized or l-diversified version of T without revealing the original records to the adversary.We propose a distributed data collection protocol that outputs an anonymized table by generalization of quasi-identifier attributes. The protocol employs cryptographictechniques such as homomorphic encryption, private information retrieval and secure multiparty computation to ensure the privacy goal in the process of data collection. Meanwhile, the protocol is designed to leak limited but noncritical information to achieve practicability and efficiency. Experiments show that the utility of the anonymized table derived by our protocol is in par with theutility achieved by traditional anonymization techniques .

Over the past three decades, the rent-to-income ratio for renter households in the United States hasincreased substantially. It is estimated that nearly half of all renter households in the United States devote 30percent or more of their household income to housing expenditures. Currently, the U.S. Department of Housing andUrban Development classifies those households who spend 30 percent or more of their income on rental housingexpenditures as rent burdened and 50 percent or more as severely rent burdened. During this same time period,government land-use regulations have increasingly become more restrictive. Although there is a substantial body ofempirical and descriptive literature describing the effects of land-use regulations on housing prices very littleresearch has been done on the determinants of the rental housing market. In this paper I address this void in theliterature by using a unique jurisdictional level regulatory data set from the state of Florida. An interestingcomponent of this analysis is the measurement of the regulatory environment. We estimate the relationship betweenrent burdens and regulations using four unique econometric methods, and compare the results. Results from theempirical models indicate that, consistent with theory, rent burdens increase with more stringent land useregulations.

This paper examines Chinas role in declining US manufacturing employment and increasing productivity. We present a set of empirical facts using micro-census data from 1990 and 2005 that suggest that rapid increases in trade between the two countries has been underestimated as an explanation for these trends. First, Chinese employment growth has been largest in industries with US employment declines, suggesting substitution between US and Chinese workers. Second, during the sample period, while the share of workers performing routine occupations in the US declined, the share increased in China, and these changes were correlated across industries. We also find correlated increases in the manager to worker ratio in the US and declines in this ratio in China, implying that more routine tasks of the production process are being sent overseas. Third, we document that Chinese employment growth by industry is highly correlated with declining unit labor costs and productivity growth in the US, suggesting that the rapid US productivity growth is directly related to trade with China. We then examine the association between Chinese employment growth and profits and wages among USfirms and workers. We find that within manufacturing, Chinese employment growth is correlated with corporate profit growth and increasing wage inequality among the remaining US manufacturing workers. Our results suggest that the role of technological progress (e.g. automation) may be overstated relative to trade-based explanations for recent trends in productivity growth and employment decline in US manufacturing.

En este artículo se analiza la inserción ocupacional de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos en las áreas metropolitanas de Nueva York y Los Ángeles. Con datos de la Encuesta de la Comunidad Estadunidense –American Community Survey– del año 2007, se observan las diferencias entre trabajadores de acuerdo con el lugar de origen, el sexo y el área metropolitana. Se constata que los latinoamericanos en ambas áreas metropolitanas participan más en ocupaciones calificadas que el conjunto de inmigrantes en el nivel nacional, pero que esta participación es significativamente inferior a la de los nativos blancos no hispanos. También se observa que hay alta participación de inmigrantes con estudios superiores en ocupaciones de bajo perfil. Se concluye que la escolaridad, el nivel de inglés y los años de permanencia en Estados Unidos tienen un peso importante en la inserción ocupacional de los inmigrantes, pero varían según el lugar de origen y al área metropolitana en que se concentren.

Using a mixed-methods approach, this paper critically evaluates the conceptualization and measurement of stay-at-home parenthood by the Census Bureau. More specifically, I combine Census microdata from the American Community Survey, semi-structured interviews and household time diary data from 40 fathers to empirically examine the time-use of men who "stay home." I find that -- due to fathers' time devoted to paid work, education, volunteering, and leisure, as well as their wives efforts and children's hours spent in school or activities -- men who identify as "stay-at-home parents" report little difference in "primary caregiving" hours per week than fathers who are employed full-time. In addition, 2 out of 3 self-identified stay-at-home fathers would be excluded from the official Census count due to their participation in paid work, short duration of time at home, or alternative reasons stated for not being in the laborforce. I build on these findings by detailing how fathers who identify as full-time caregivers define stay-at-home parenthood in their own words. I then extend these results to stay-at-home mothers, suggesting that stay-at-home parents, in general, are diminishing in number because of the increasingly antiquated conceptualizations and measurements we use to define them. I conclude by proposing that the Census expands its criteria or changes its measurements to a focus on primary caregivers" instead.

This paper studies the long run spatial development of U.S. counties and metro areas between 1790 and 2000. The often-documented orthogonality between population growth and initial population size - Gibrat's law - only emerges recently. Between 1790 and 1940 population growth tends to be decreasing with county population, except among the largest counties, for which population growth is slightlyincreasing with county population. The negative correlation between size and growth among small locations is largely driven by the entry of new counties, and dissipates after 1940. Over time the relation between size and growth flattens, though it is only for the subgroup of counties that entered long ago that Gibrat's law cannot be rejected in recent years. A simple one-sector model successfully approximates this evolving distribution of local population. Locations diff er by a permanent TFP parameter and a date of entry into the aggregate economy. Upon entry, an assumed friction slows the transition of locations'populations to their steady-state levels. Gibrat's law emerges as the system of locations approaches its steady state.

My focus for this paper is the 1870 census of wealth. As a part of the decennial count of the population the Census Office collected data from every adult enumerated on the value of the real estate owned and the amount of personal property held. The information collected has, as shouldbe expected, some deficiencies, but with due attention to the quality of the data and the conceptual problems that confound its interpretation, I am willing to proceed. I argue that the magnitude and distribution of wealth and the humped shape of the wealth-age profile indicate a widespread adoption of life-cycle saving strategies. Entrepreneurial accumulation also payed a significant, but less important, role in explaining the patterns observed.

With the establishment of GIS industry and the popularization of digital information and products throughout the world,GIS has been becoming an information industry for application fields.According to the research application fields of GIS technology at present,the most applications are focused on natural science which has strong spatial attributes,but the applications in philosophy,human and social sciences which need the support of spatio-temporal attributes are few.Therefore,in order to improve the support of spatio-temporal attributes for the research of philosophy,human and social sciences,study the application of GIS technology in this field,the Chinese social sciences integration geospatial information services platform was constructed.From the research of current application of GIS technology in the field of social sciences,this paper detailedly analyzed the rich resources owned by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,discussed the construction objective and main functions of Chinese social sciences integration geospatial information services platform,and prospected the further application of the system.

This dissertation examines three dimensions gender, race, and salary -- of the national teacher labor force that emerged in the post-World War II period. First, teaching became increasingly feminized; it became a stable occupation for college-educated women because with the lift of the marriage bar, women were allowed to work after marriage and having children. In regards to the racial and ethnic composition of the national teacher labor force, the whitening of the Southern teacher labor force in the post-desegregation era converged to that of the rest of the United States; the rate at which white teachers were hired as teachers was greater than that of black teachers. Finally, examining the salary returns to the bachelors in education degree in the teacher and non-teacher labor markets the findings show that the bachelors in education degree has the greatest salary return in teaching. The standardization of teacher education resulting from institutional isomorphism led to the regional convergence in the social characteristics of American teachers. Therefore, this dissertation is an historical analysis of the homogenization in the social characteristics of the American teacher labor force in the post-war era.

I examine a series of surveys of (primarily) industrial workers taken in the late-nineteenth century United States to support the proposition that life-cycle saving was common and that, as a consequence, saving rates of the working class were surprisingly high. The surveys have detailed information on income, wage rates, occupation,unemployment, self-reported productivity, savings, and also some limited information on asset holdings. Thereare also retrospective questions that allow me to examine how things changed for individual workers over time.Saving behavior in this era seems to have been motivated by the challenges that industrial workers of the time facedas they aged: declining incomes, more frequent and longer episodes of unemployment, and voluntary or unavoidabledownward occupational mobility. While full retirement was also common for the very old, accumulated assets wereprimarily a protection against falling income and enforced idleness at a time when many elderly could not dependupon their grown children to support them. I supplement the worker surveys with evidence of wealth holdings fromthe public-use samples of the 1870 U.S. Census of Wealth material previously under-appreciated by economichistorians. The information collected has, as should be expected, some deficiencies, but with due attention to thequality of the data and the conceptual problems that confound its interpretation, I am willing to proceed. Theconclusions challenge the findings of life-cycle skeptics such as Michael Darby, Laurence Kotlikoff, LawrenceSummers, and others.

We relate trends in the proportions of stay-at-home father households with macroeconomic fluctuations and change in social norms regarding gender roles. Specifically, we suggest that during an economic downturn, stay-at-home father households become more prevalent; male spouses lose their job and female spouses become the sole earners of a household. Once the labor market recovers and unemployment rates decline, the proportion of stay-at-home father households also declines, but stays above pre-economic downturn levels. Thus, labor market conditions are associated with changes in division of household work. We test this proposition using CPS data from 1976-2009. We find an association between increased unemployment levelsand the proportion of stay-at-home father households. In addition, each recession is associated with a boost in the proportion of stay-at-home father households in the population. Finally, the increase in stay-at-home father households is driven by an increase in both fathers who stay at home to take care of children and fathers who stay at home for other reasons, mostly inability to work or find work.