Where You Are
Location and happiness in the United States
William Sander
Economics Letters, September 2011, Pages 277-279
Abstract:
The effect of living in a less urban area on the probability of being happy is estimated. It is shown that less urban areas are associated with higher levels of happiness. Further, it is shown that respondents in the north region are less happy. Data from the National Opinion Research Center's "General Social Survey" are used.
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The Economic Impact of Social Ties: Evidence from German Reunification
Konrad Burchardi & Tarek Alexander Hassan
NBER Working Paper, June 2011
Abstract:
We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to identify a causal effect of social ties on regional economic growth. We show that households who have social ties to East Germany in 1989 experience a persistent rise in their personal incomes after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the presence of these households significantly affects economic performance at the regional level: it increases the returns to entrepreneurial activity, the share of households who become entrepreneurs, and the likelihood that firms based within a given West German region invest in East Germany. As a result, West German regions which (for idiosyncratic reasons) have a high concentration of households with social ties to the East exhibit substantially higher growth in income per capita in the early 1990s. A one standard deviation rise in the share of households with social ties to East Germany in 1989 is associated with a 4.6 percentage point rise in income per capita over six years. We interpret our findings as evidence that social ties between individuals can indeed facilitate economic growth.
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Everybody's Doin' It (Right?): Neighborhood Norms and Sexual Activity in Adolescence
Tara Warner et al.
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
A neighborhood's normative climate is linked to, but conceptually distinct from, its structural characteristics such as poverty and racial/ethnic composition. Given the deleterious consequences of early sexual activity for adolescent health and well-being, it is important to assess normative influences on youth behaviors such as sexual debut, number of sex partners, and involvement in casual sexual experiences. The current study moves beyond prior research by constructing a measure of normative climate that more fully captures neighborhood norms, and analyzing the influence of normative climate on behavior in a longitudinal framework. Using recently geo-coded data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (TARS), we analyze the effect of normative climate on adolescents' sexual behaviors. Results indicate that variation in neighborhood normative climates increases adolescents' odds of sexual debut and casual sex, and is associated with their number of sex partners, even after accounting for neighborhood structural disadvantage and demographic risk factors.
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Why Do Rural Firms Live Longer?
Li Yu, Peter Orazem & Robert Jolly
American Journal of Agricultural Economics, April 2011, Pages 669-688
Abstract:
For the first thirteen years after entry, the hazard rate for firm exits is persistently higher for urban than for rural firms. While differences in observed industry market, local market, and firm attributes explain some of the rural/urban gap in firm survival, rural firms retain a survival advantage 18% greater in Iowa and 58% greater in Kansas than observationally equivalent urban firms. Evidence is consistent with a lower salvage price for the capital assets of failed rural firms. Entrepreneurs will require a higher success probability to enter a rural market rather than an urban market to leave their expected profits equal.
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War and early state formation in the northern Titicaca Basin, Peru
Charles Stanish & Abigail Levine
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Excavations at the site of Taraco in the northern Titicaca Basin of southern Peru indicate a 2,600-y sequence of human occupation beginning ca. 1100 B.C.E. Previous research has identified several political centers in the region in the latter part of the first millennium B.C.E. The two largest centers were Taraco, located near the northern lake edge, and Pukara, located 50 km to the northwest in the grassland pampas. Our data reveal that a high-status residential section of Taraco was burned in the first century A.D., after which economic activity in the area dramatically declined. Coincident with this massive fire at Taraco, Pukara adopted many of the characteristics of state societies and emerged as an expanding regional polity. We conclude that organized conflict, beginning approximately 500 B.C.E., is a significant factor in the evolution of the archaic state in the northern Titicaca Basin.
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Fertility Decisions and Endogenous Residential Sorting
Semih Tumen
Regional Science and Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper develops a theoretical framework to consider fertility decisions within an endogenous sorting model of neighborhood effects. The models in the literature typically assume that each family is endowed with children whose expected schooling outcomes are determined by parental preferences on neighborhood quality. However, empirical studies report that the fertility dimension is also endogenous. Specifically, fertility is documented to be negatively related to neighborhood quality. We extend the model originally developed by Nesheim (2001) to account for endogenous fertility in a framework featuring endogenous contextual effects. Altruistic parents jointly choose how many children to produce and which neighborhood to live. We investigate whether the model can support an equilibrium where fertility is negatively related to neighborhood quality as the data suggest. We find that sorting over parental human capital cannot explain the observed negative relationship between fertility and neighborhood quality except for a restricted set of likely unrealistic parameter values. Sorting in terms of the human capital levels of children, however, can produce such an equilibrium for more reasonable parameter values.
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Tama Leventhal & Véronique Dupéré
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study re-analyzed data on adolescent health outcomes (N = 1,780; M age = 15.15, SD = 2.30) from a 5-year evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) Program. The MTO program is a randomized experiment conducted in five cities in the United States (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York) in which low-income families living in public housing in ‘high poverty' neighborhoods were offered vouchers and assistance to move to ‘low-poverty' neighborhoods. The objective was to reexamine program effects as a function of exposure to ‘low-poverty' neighborhoods to determine whether beneficial effects reported for girls' mental health and behavior generalized to other outcomes for girls and to boys. As found in previous evaluations, girls in the MTO program group, whose families remained in ‘low-poverty' neighborhoods for comparatively long period (approximately 5 years), had better mental health and engaged in fewer risky behaviors than a matched control sample of girls, whose families stayed in ‘high-poverty' neighborhoods. Further, additional benefits for girls were seen in the education domain. Adverse program effects on boys' behavior problems, reported in other MTO research using different methods, were not evident in our analysis. Findings suggest that programs relocating low-income families to ‘low-poverty' neighborhoods should provide supports to families and to receiving communities to promote residential stability and social integration.
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Madhuri Sharma
Applied Geography, March 2012, Pages 310-323
Abstract:
Racial/ethnic diversity in the United States has increased significantly in recent decades, with minority groups now accounting for almost one-third of the total population. At the same time, growing diversity has spread into rural and non-metropolitan areas. Research suggests that changing diversity in the ‘New South' has seen growth of non-Black communities. The question, however, is the degree to which increasing diversity equates with increasing intermixing or, alternatively, whether racial/ethnic clusters retain their prominence. This paper examines the geographic manifestations of growing racial/ethnic diversity within intra-urban context, using census-tracts as scale of analysis in the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) of Knoxville in Tennessee. The statistics used for analyzing intra-urban variations include Diversity Score, Theil Entropy Index, and Location Quotient. Tract and Block-group data for White, Black, American Indian, Asian, All Others and Hispanic are used for computing these indices. This paper concludes that diversity has increased during 1990-2000, and has dispersed into suburban counties. However, segregation and clustering for certain minority groups has also increased, in particular African-Americans still remain the most segregated and most clustered community confined to specific geographic locations. This research holds significance as local economic development patterns are very much guided by the geographic variability of human and social capital. Applied research can suggest avenues for growth and can help rebuild local communities. This paper will also contribute to literature focusing on methodological challenges in measuring diversity and its geographic manifestations.
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What do drawings reveal about people's attitudes toward countries and their citizens?
Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi et al.
Social Psychology, Summer 2011, Pages 231-240
Abstract:
Participants (N = 567) from six countries (Belgium, Ivory Coast, Italy, Kosovo, Portugal, and Switzerland) drew borders of their own and of neighbor countries on boundary-free maps. It was predicted and found that the tendency to overestimate versus underestimate the sizes of the countries, compared to the original maps, reflects the perceiver's attitudes toward the target country, status asymmetries, and the quality of relations between the ingroup and outgroup countries. The findings are discussed with regard to the use of drawings in revealing people's attitudes toward outgroups.
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US Metropolitan Spatial Structure and Labour Accessibility
Miwa Matsuo
Urban Studies, August 2011, Pages 2283-2302
Abstract:
Metropolitan areas vary widely in employment distribution and labour accessibility. Comparing four US metropolitan areas - Atlanta, Boston, Phoenix and Washington, DC - it is found that Atlanta and Washington, DC suffer from low labour accessibility compared with Boston and Phoenix. Moreover, large suburban employment centres in Atlanta and Washington, DC suffer from even lower accessibility than other employment centres within the same metropolitan areas or their counterparts in Boston and Phoenix. Their low labour accessibility is mainly explained by slower commuting speeds. Even though their residential and employment densities are modest, congestion in these employment centres is severe enough to undermine accessibility. The results raise questions about the effectiveness of creating large sub-centres in metropolitan areas, particularly creating auto-oriented edge-city-style employment centres at highway nodes.
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Density and Disasters: Economics of Urban Hazard Risk
Somik Lall & Uwe Deichmann
World Bank Research Observer, forthcoming
Abstract:
Today, 370 million people live in cities in earthquake prone areas and 310 million in cities with a high probability of tropical cyclones. By 2050 these numbers are likely to more than double, leading to a greater concentration of hazard risk in many of the world's cities. The authors discuss what sets hazard risk in urban areas apart, summarize estimates of valuation of hazard risk, and discuss implications for individual mitigation and public policy. The main conclusions are that urban agglomeration economies change the cost-benefit calculation of hazard mitigation; that good hazard management is first and foremost good general urban management; and that the public sector must perform better in promoting market-based risk reduction by generating and disseminating credible information on hazard risk in cities.