intra metropolitan variation in earnings and labor market discrimination an econometric analysis of the atlanta labor market one of the most enduring debates concerning racial differences in earnings is whether housing segregation within metropolitan areas adversely affects the employment opportunities of urban blacks two possible negative effects can be listed first the decentralization of lower skilled jobs combined with the suburban residential exclusion of low income households may have caused wage rates within the suburban labor market to rise above those paid within the central city if this is the case and if housing market discrimination restricts the relative ability of blacks to offer their labor supply to suburban employers then at least part of the racial difference in earnings can be attributed to housing segregation second housing segregation may cause private sector labor market discrimination to be more severe within the central city in comparison to suburban areas as suggested by becker s taste for discriminating model 3 a relatively large black labor supply within the central city may require a lower black to white earnings ratio in order to induce prejudiced employers to hire large numbers of black workers with the workforce of most central cities becoming increasingly black this may be an important factor in explaining racial differences in earnings surprisingly while variation in discrimination among occupations regions industries and sectors have been examined in some detail spatial differences in discrimination between the central city and suburbs have largely escaped analysis in this paper the earnings of private sector workers broken down by occupation race and sex are compared between worksite areas encompassing the metropolitan area of atlanta georgia while an extensive literature can be found on interregional differences in earnings little evidence exists on the spatial variation in wage rates within metropolitan regions in fact virtually nothing has been done on this issue since the classic study of the chicago labor market by rees and shultz 19

are ghettos good or bad spatial separation of racial and ethnic groups may theoretically have positive or negative effects on the economic performance of those groups we examine the effects of segregation on outcomes for blacks in schooling employment and single parenthood we find that blacks in more segregated areas have significantly worse outcomes than blacks in less segregated areas we control for the endogeneity of location choice using instruments based on political factors topographical features and residence before adulthood a one standard deviation decrease in segregation would eliminate one third of the black white differences in most of our outcomes

dual labor markets efficiency wages and search this article presents an equilibrium model of a dual labor market firms are assumed to be identical ex ante and dualism arises endogenously the dual labor market outcome is supported by efficiency wage and search considerations firms choose wage effort requirement packages optimally given optimal search and effort choice by workers and vice versa we prove existence and investigate the occurrence and nature of dual labor market equilibria

male sub metropolitan black white wage gaps new evidence for the 1980s this study analyses trends in us male black white earnings gaps by sub metropolitan residence large suburban earnings gaps existed in 1979 however central city gaps exhibited the largest increases during the 1980s the increases are decomposed into changes in measurable characteristics changes in the prices of measurable characteristics changes in discrimination and or unobservable skills and changes in white earnings inequality changes in measured characteristics and their prices and changes in inequality account for little of the increases in central city gaps either labour market discrimination worsened or racial differences in unobservable skills widened a review of the literature suggests that this paper s evidence is more consistent with a worsening in discrimination

ethnicity neighborhoods and human capital externalities the socioeconomic performance of today s workers depends not only on parental skills but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parents generation or ethnic capital this paper investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods the evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic background of the neighborhood where the children were raised ethnicity has an external effect even among persons who grow up in the same neighborhood when children are exposed frequently to persons who share the same ethnic background copyright 1995 by american economic association

sprawl or reagglomeration the dynamics of employment deconcentration and industrial transformation in greater paris from 1975 to 1999 employment in the paris metropolitan area became more and more decentralised the losses from central areas were divided equally between sprawl and peripheral clusters parallel to the deconcentration of jobs the growth of a services oriented economy has led to an increase in sectoral concentration however there is no clear evidence of a vertical spatial disintegration because at the same time the economy of all places has tended to diversify one explanation might be that sprawl relies both on endogenous job creation and on job relocation relocations tend to increase the specialisation of the clusters while endogenous growth is more diverse thanks to the importance of domestic activities

do liberal cities limit new housing development evidence from california traditional explanations for why some communities block new housing construction focus on incumbent home owner incentives to block entry local resident political ideology may also influence community permitting decisions this paper uses city level panel data across california metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2008 to document that liberal cities grant fewer new housing permits than observationally similar cities located within the same metropolitan area cities experiencing a growth in their liberal voter share have a lower new housing permit growth rate

dual labor markets urban unemployment and multicentric cities a two sector model of urban employment is developed which focuses on the formation of a secondary sector in response to a primary sector demand shock the optimal location of this single firm sector is shown to give rise to a multicentric urban spatial structure conditions are then established under which the new labor market equilibrium involves both a decrease in unemployment and an increase in net income for those unemployed these results are extended to a case where all unemployment benefits are financed by local taxation of firms here it is shown that profit incentives may exist for the primary sector to subsidize entry of the secondary sector c 1997 academic press

the local structure of the welfare state uneven effects of social spending on poverty within countries research has shown that there is a strong negative relationship between social spending and poverty levels among urban inequality researchers it is often assumed that compared with the usa the welfare state has mitigated social differences explaining lower levels of urban inequality in most european countries however research on the role of the welfare state is often conducted on the national level and is thus unable to draw conclusions on the effects of social spending and redistribution on a lower level failing to take the within country variation into account this study connects welfare state research to urban inequality research by investigating the effects of social spending on poverty in urban and non urban areas we have conducted a cross national multilevel logistic regression analysis using eurostat and european social survey data of 2008 our findings suggest that the effects of social spending are unequally distributed within countries

evidence on discrimination in mortgage lending much of the controversy about whether mortgage lenders discriminate against minorities can be explained in terms of the confusion about how to define discrimination based on the legal definition careful studies of loan denial rates such as that done by the federal reserve bank of boston represent an appropriate method for testing for discrimination by lenders based on that study it is quite clear that lenders discriminate the fact that minorities have higher default rates on average than whites is irrelevant to the interpretation of the race coefficient in such models nonetheless more research on and discussion about the relationship between the race of the applicant and delinquencies defaults and losses would be desirable

intraurban wage gradients evidence by race gender occupational class and sector abstract a general functional form is used to estimate intraurban wage gradients for various groups of workers with 1980 data from the philadelphia detroit and boston metropolitan areas as predicted by the standard monocentric model of urban land use the following results are obtained for most groups of white workers negative and statistically significant wage gradients steeper wage gradients for higher wage earners and an increase in the steepness of wage gradients as the cbd is approached positive wage gradients are not found for black workers despite the fact that suburban employers hire large numbers of these workers who reside within the central city this result is taken as support for the hypothesis that blacks have been disadvantaged by job suburbanization and continued housing market segregation

black residential centralization and the spatial mismatch hypothesis abstract black residential centralization is found to be an important determinant of black employment status when estimated across metropolitan areas mas to avoid neighborhood selection the effects are greatest in large mas for the young and elderly and for individuals with less than a college education instrumental variable iv estimates support ordinary least squares ols results black residential centralization can account for 48 62 of the black white employment differential among 18 30 year olds living in large mas when estimated together black residential centralization job centralization and segregation all have large effects but the effects of black centralization and job centralization are considerably larger

the effect of land use regulation on housing and land prices abstract this paper investigates the effects of land use regulation restrictiveness on house and vacant land prices in contrast to prior studies the index of restrictiveness is treated as an endogenous variable and estimated effects are allowed to vary by market setting using data on more than 100 florida cities greater regulation restrictiveness is found to increase house price and decrease land price evidence is also provided showing that more restrictiveness increases the size of newly constructed homes

ethnic unemployment rates and frictional markets the unemployment rate in france is roughly 6 percentage points higher for african immigrants than for natives in the us the unemployment rate is approximately 9 percentage points higher for blacks than for whites commute time data indicates that minorities face longer commute times to work potentially reflecting more difficult access to jobs in this paper we investigate the impact of spatial mismatch on the unemployment rate of ethnic groups using the matching model proposed by rupert and wasmer 2012 we find that spatial factors explain 1 1 5 percentage points of the unemployment rate gap in both france and the us amounting to 17 25 of the relative gap in france and about 10 17 5 in the us among these factors differences in commuting distance play the most important role in france though longer commuting distances may be mitigated by higher mobility in the housing market for african workers overall we still conclude that labor market factors remain the main explanation for the higher unemployment rate of africans

residential segregation and the economic status of black workers new evidence for an old debate abstract scholars have long debated whether ghetto residence lowers the earnings of blacks most empirical studies on this question have been flawed because they have not considered the simultaneous effects of choices of work and residence locations and the effects of intrametropolitan variation in rents and wages this paper estimates a revealed preference model of intraurban location with data from the 1980 public use microdata sample for cleveland detroit and philadelphia to test whether black male household heads who are employed full time year round are less likely than whites to live and work at their best locations we measure the wages rents and commuting costs associated with each possible job residence location combination in these cities for each person given their job qualifications and their housing needs a revealed preference approach is used to evaluate the economic welfare of individuals at each possible location and then compare the actual distribution of work and residence locations by race with the welfare maximizing distribution the divergence in these distributions by race measures the economic effects for employed black male household heads of residential segregation in ghettos we find that the economic status of blacks can be improved significantly by changing their intrametropolitan job locations surprisingly this conclusion holds regardless of whether or not blacks keep their current residential locations while changes in residential locations can improve the economic status of blacks relative to whites by decreasing commuting and or the cost of housing such residential changes do not significantly alter the physical accessibility of better paying jobs

search and consumer theory a consumer faces list prices for commodities but can buy one at a discount discounts vary randomly between sellers the number of quotations sought depends on list prices search costs and wealth this function is homogeneous of degree zero and provided some sufficient conditions are satisfied is increasing in wealth decreasing in search cost independent of the list price of the discounted commodity if indirect utility is multiplicatively separable increasing in the list price if the commodity is a necessity increasing in the list price of substitutes slutsky s equation is generalized to include search

on the endogeneous formation of secondary employment centers in a city a new approach is proposed to explain the formation of secondary employment centers in a monocentric city specifically a large firm considers locating a new plant in a city where none of the existing businesses has a significative share of the labor force so that its location can be viewed as a secondary employment center the choice of this location results from the interplay between the process of competition on both the labor and land markets and the technological externalities generated by the proximity of the city center where other firms are located

job search and unemployment duration implications for the spatial mismatch hypothesis abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between unemployment duration and the spatial distribution of employment it builds on the spatial mismatch literature by analyzing the role of access in a job search framework a unique measure of access is created using municipal level employment growth and a matrix of commuting times for the pittsburgh metropolitan area individuals with more access to employment are found to have shorter unemployment spells the effect of access on unemployment duration is found to be sensitive to the specification of access

causes of sprawl a portrait from space we study the extent to which u s urban development is sprawling and what determines differences in sprawl across space using remote sensing data to track the evolution of land use on a grid of 8 7 billion 30 30 meter cells we measure sprawl as the amount of undeveloped land surrounding an average urban dwelling the extent of sprawl remained roughly unchanged between 1976 and 1992 although it varied dramatically across metropolitan areas ground water availability temperate climate rugged terrain decentralized employment early public transport infrastructure uncertainty about metropolitan growth and unincorporated land in the urban fringe all increase sprawl

demand function estimation and the law of one price this paper shows that the method of estimating of demand functions may contain an erroneous implicit assumption when aggregated data are used this assumption revealed by the choice of regressors yields estimates of own price elasticity and other coefficients that are inconsistent it can also cause heteroscedasticity in the second stage of two stage least squares estimation where none would otherwise exist

customer discrimination and employment outcomes for minority workers this paper investigates the effects of customer discrimination on the employment and earnings of minorities particularly blacks data are used from a new survey of employers in four large metropolitan areas in the united states our results show that the racial composition of an establishment s customers has sizable effects on the race of who gets hired particularly in jobs that involve direct contact with customers and in sales or service occupations race of customers also affects wages with employees in establishments that have mostly black customers earning less than those in establishments with mostly white customers

strategic control of growth in a system of cities abstract this paper provides an analysis of the supply restriction model of growth controls growth controls in such a model harm consumers while enriching landowners and they will only be adopted if landowners have political power in the model this power is manifested in the city government s use of a social welfare that takes both landlord and consumer welfare into account since cities cannot be small if the supply restriction inherent in growth controls is to have an impact strategic interactions must be considered in the analysis of city choices a general model is presented and an extended example based on leontief preferences is then considered comparative static analysis of nash equilibria in the leontief case shows that perturbations of preferences or other characteristics of a single city can have important spillover effects that alter the choices of all cities in the region

bid rents under unemployment risk delayed versus timeless uncertainty in this paper we analyze the impact of uncertainty on the level and properties of the bid rent function we show that these properties strongly depend upon the vr ay in which uncertainty is introduced into the model delayed versus timeless uncertainty we also investigate the implication of income uncertainty for the city equilibrium we show that under timeless uncertainty a more generous unemployment benefits program may be in the long run welfare reducing in an urban setting c 1997 academic press

commutes quits and moves abstract this paper analyzes the effects of commuting distance on quit and move propensities in metropolitan areas with conventional wage and housing price gradients most workers ordinarily move in order to lengthen commutes and quit in order to shorten them however quits and moves by workers whose residential choices are constrained by segregation should be relatively insensitive to commutes descriptive statistics and simultaneous probit estimates of move and quit propensities for white and black employees of a single firm confirm these predictions they demonstrate that long commutes encourage white quits and discourage white moves commute increases of one standard deviation would increase white quit propensities and reduce white move propensities by approximately 10 in contrast commutes by black employees have no significant effects on their quit and move propensities

us high technology multinationals and silicon glen haug p 1986 us high technology multinationals and silicon glen reg studies 20 103 116 future growth and investment by high technology industries have generated increasing interest in the agglomeration tendencies of high technology firms governments throughout the world are seeking to develop high technology firm concentrations similar to silicon valley in california an area that represents one of the largest high technology industry clusters outside the united states is scotland s silicon glen this article is based on interviews conducted at fourteen us owned manufacturing plants in silicon glen and sets out to 1 define the terms high technology industry and silicon glen 2 summarize research on the origins of silicon valley boston s route 128 silicon fen or the cambridge phenomenon and the m4 corridor near london and 3 present evidence on the location and investment activities of us multinational enterprises in silicon glen the results indicate that the attributes attracting high te

bidding for firms recently toyota sought a plant location in the united states the 800 million plant will employ 3000 workers and numerous states offered toyota generous investment incentives hoping this would induce toyota to select their state the commonwealth of kentucky won this competition but the price was high the present value of the payments exceeds 125 million the payment of investment incentives for the toyota plant is not unique in 1976 pennsylvania paid 75 million to attract a volkswagen plan nissan honda and mazda received generous investment incentives when locating plants in the united states and this bidding is not limited to states to attract the headquarters of the presbyterian church usa with its 1300 jobs and 38 million annual payroll civic leaders in louisville kentucky offered the church a warehouse and 6 2 million for renovation of the structure bidding the church away from kansas city missouri in this paper we contend that this competition may result from the average cost pricing of publicly provided goods and services 2 when the marginal cost of providing a firm and its workers with public services is less than the tax revenue they generate a government may offer the firm subsidies that reduce the distortions the average cost pricing of the public service creates thus this competition for industry is not a zero sum game where the subsidies are only transfers from the government to the firm rather these subsidies may facilitate the efficient location of industry

work location residence location and the intraurban wage gradient abstract the monocentric city model implies that work and residence locations are likely to be positively correlated and that wages decline with distance from the city center the first implication has not been explicitly tested before we provide strong support for it in census data for cleveland columbus dayton detroit indianapolis philadelphia and pittsburgh previous wage gradient estimates were hindered by lack of individual data on employment location and worker characteristics we solve this problem by estimating probit models that predict optimal work location and using the results to explain wages we find evidence of significant wage gradients

spatial mismatch in the labor market and racial differences in neighborhood crime abstract results from estimating fixed effects models of neighborhood crime show that an important cause of higher crime in black neighborhoods is the poor job accessibility of black youth a key result is that access explains 21 of the difference in property crime between black and white neighborhoods

firm racial segregation and affirmative action in the highway construction industry in this paper i document that highway construction firms in california particularly those owned by blacks and asians exhibit considerable racial segregation in that they are disproportionately located in zip codes with the greatest concentration of own race residents i find that segregated firms serve a larger market than minority owned firms that are not segregated and that this effect is concentrated in black owned firms i next exploit the segregation of firms to examine the effect of affirmative action on the success of minority owned firms following the significant curtailment of affirmative action in california due to a direct statewide ballot initiative the number of highway construction establishments located in zip codes with the highest concentrations of black and asian residents fell relative to the rest of the state even conditional on the number of non construction establishments this suggests that affirmative action policies may play a role in the net survival rates of minority owned firms

on the political economy of zoning abstract households choose a community in a metropolitan area and collectively set a minimum housing quality and a property tax to finance a local public good the collective imposition of a lower bound on housing consumption induces an income stratified equilibrium in a specification where meaningful community differentiation would not arise without zoning we show computationally that zoning restrictions are likely to be stringent with a majority facing a binding constraint in communities that permit it by inducing a stratified equilibrium zoning causes tiebout welfare gains in aggregate but with large welfare transfers relative to stratified equilibrium without zoning the zoning equilibrium is significantly more efficient as it reduces housing market distortions

informal job search and black youth unemployment in this paper i analyze how young black and white unemployed jobseekers use various methods of search and the employment outcomes which result from their use the focus is on distinguishing informal search methods i e friends and relatives or direct application without referral from more formal ones in analyzing racial differences the results show that the two informal methods of search account for about 90 of the difference in employment probabilities between white and black youth this also accounts for 57 71 of the difference in unemployment rates between the two furthermore most of these results reflect differences in the ability of these methods to generate job offers as opposed to differences in search effort or job acceptance rates however our ability to explain these differences through personal family and household characteristics was generally quite limited this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

job accessibility and female employment probability the cases of barcelona and madrid the objective of this paper is to estimate the impact of residential job accessibility on female employment probability in the metropolitan areas of barcelona and madrid following a spatial mismatch framework a female employment probability equation is estimated which includes variables controlling for personal characteristics residential segregation and employment potential by public transport network data used come from the micro census 2001 of ine the national institute of statistics the research focuses on the treatment of endogeneity problems and the measurement of accessibility variables the results show that low job accessibility in public transport negatively affects employment probability the intensity of this effect tends to decrease with individual s educational attainment a higher degree of residential segregation also reduces job probability in a significant way

expansionary zoning and the strategic behaviour of local governments this paper analyses the extent to which local land supply is the result of strategic interaction among nearby local governments in a setting of limited tax instruments to raise revenues and interj

segmented or competitive labour markets a normal roy model with four sectors is developed it allows to derive tests of several assumptions on the working of the labor market strongly or weakly competitive or segmented it shows that more important a feature of labor markets than segmentation is the presence of comparative advantages for individuals between the various economic sectors the model is applied to data on women s labor force participation in the main towns of colombia in 1980 it uses multivariate probit and tobit techniques copyright 1991 by the econometric society

job access employment and earnings outcomes for welfare leavers in a us urban labour market this article examines the effect of job access on employment outcomes for welfare recipients in cleveland ohio leaving assistance during 1998 2000 a rich longitudinal dataset is employed combining administrative and survey data with multiple measures of access to and competition for jobs the focus is on both a population and a range of measures of employment outcomes not previously studied in this context empirical ambiguity in the existing literature has resulted from the difficulty of modelling causality when employment and residential location are jointly determined in this study labour market outcomes are related to the residential locations of welfare leavers prior to employment thus overcoming much potential endogeneity virtually no evidence is found that job access influences labour market outcomes for this population

an empirical investigation of intraurban wage gradients abstract intraurban wage gradients have received little attention in the urban literature but have been shown theoretically to be important indicators of the spatial characteristics of urban economic activity this study examines the spatial distribution of wages of five groups of municipal public employees in the chicago smsa negative wage gradients significant at the 0 05 level are found for four of the five labor groups results show that monthly wages decrease on average as much as 24 per additional mile from the city center

there is no free house abstract this paper estimates the effect of a housing relocation program on the labor supply and living conditions of low income households across major cities in south africa using panel microdata collected between 2008 and 2014 it exploits the arbitrary eligibility rules of the policy with a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to obtain reduced form estimates there are three main findings first in the short term of 2 to 4 years following relocation the labor supply of recipient households decreases driven mostly by a reduction of female hours second the large increase in distance km to economic opportunities seems to be an important factor behind the decline directly or indirectly through family shifts in earning strategies finally evidence is limited regarding improvements in housing and neighborhood quality overall there is no clear indication that the net welfare effect of relocation is positive

a theory of dual labor markets with application to industrial policy discrimination and keynesian unemployment this paper develops a model of dual labor markets based on employers need to motivate workers in order to elicit effort from their workers employers may find it optimal to pay more than the going wage this changes fundamentally the character of labor markets the model is applied to a wide range of labor market phenomena it provides a coherent framework for understanding the claims of industrial policy advocates it also can provide the basis for a theory of occupational segregation and discrimination that will not be eroded by market forces finally the model provides the basis for a theory of involuntary unemployment

testing for strategic interaction among local governments the case of growth controls this paper helps to fill a gap in the public economics literature by providing empirical evidence on strategic interaction among local governments using the methodology of case et al journal of public economics 52 285 307 1993 the paper focuses on the adoption of growth control measures by cities in california and looks for evidence of policy interdependence in these choices the data are drawn from an elaborate survey of growth control practices in california cities conducted by glickfeld and levine regional growth local reaction lincoln institute of land policy cambridge ma 1992 the survey results are used to compute an index of the stringency of growth controls in each city which serves as the dependent variable for the study

car ownership and the labor market of ethnic minorities we show how initial wealth differences between low skilled minorities and white workers can generate differences in their labor market outcomes this even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against ethnic minorities or exogenous differences in distance to jobs because of the initial wealth difference minorities cannot afford to buy a car while whites can car ownership allows whites to reach more jobs per unit of time which gives them a better bargaining position in the labor market as a result in equilibrium ethnic minorities end up with both higher unemployment rates and lower wages than whites furthermore we also show that it takes more time for minorities to reach their jobs even though they travel less miles when employed those predictions are consistent with the data better access to capital markets or better public transportation will reduce the differences in labor market outcomes

urban economic theory land use and city size this book examines the economic reasons why people choose to live where they live and develops through analysis of the bid rent function a unified theory of urban land use and city size the first part of the book explicates the basic theory of urban land use and optimal city size residential location behavior of households is examined in a microeconomic framework and equilibrium and optimal patterns of residential land use are discussed the corresponding equilibrium and optimal city sizes are studied in a variety of contexts part two extends the classical theories of von thunen and alonso with the addition of externality factors such as local public goods crowding and congestion and racial prejudice the rigorous mathematical approach and theoretical treatment of the material make urban economic theory of interest to researchers in urban economics location theory urban geography and urban planning

spatial mismatch search effort and urban spatial structure abstract the aim of this paper is to provide a new mechanism for the spatial mismatch hypothesis spatial mismatch can here be the result of optimizing behavior on the part of the labor market participants in particular the unemployed can choose low amounts of search and long term unemployment if they reside far away from jobs they choose voluntary not to relocate close to jobs because the short run gains low land rent and large housing consumption are big enough compared to the long run gains of residing near jobs higher probability of finding a job

a test of dual labor market theory despite substantial differences in their views of the appropriate policy response to the existence of poverty neither the proponents of dual market theory nor its critics have proposed potentially conclusive tests of the dual market hypothesis this paper presents a test of the two central propositions of dual market theory 1 the existence of two distinct labor markets with different wage setting mechanisms and 2 the existence of barriers to mobility between the labor markets we find considerable support for both hypothesis estimation of a switching model of wage determination with unknown regimes yields two distinct wage equations the one which most workers are associated with closely resembles the standard human capital regression with significant returns to education and experience the other equation is flat with no returns to human capital these two equations resemble the predictions of dual market theory for the primary and secondary markets respectively further we present evidence that at least some non white workers are involuntarily confined to the secondary market this crowding of minority workers into the low wage labor market accounts for a substantial portion of white non white wage differences we interpret these results as providing empirical support for the dual market hypothesis and for recent theoretical work on efficiency wagemodels in addition combining the efficiency wage argument with the observation that much of the white non white wage difference is explained by the exclusion of non whites from the primary sector suggests an explanation for the persistance of wage differences this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

product variety and sector specific unemployment in this paper we combine the harris todaro wage differential and unemployment with product variety we analyse how city size is determined and how it relates to unemployment our main conclusion is as follows if the government or the city authority executes the policy leading to growth in the urban population then the unemployment rate decreases furthermore in this case even the number of the unemployed can decrease although the city size increases

the sensitivity of consumer search to wages abstract while intuition suggests that an increase in wages should increase the time cost of consumer search for low prices this note shows that under reasonable conditions the resulting increase in consumption actually increases search intensity

spatial mismatch in search equilibrium we construct a search equilibrium model for a city with central and suburban labor markets that is consistent with the set of empirical regularities commonly associated with the spatial mismatch hypothesis a higher rate of unemployment for central city residents than suburban residents a higher job vacancy rate for suburban firms and reverse commuting and higher suburban wages the effectiveness and welfare implications of public policy programs that might be used to remedy the underlying mismatch are examined

the spatial mismatch hypothesis what has the evidence shown this paper reviews 20 years worth of empirical evidence on the spatial mismatch hypothesis after briefly surveying the relevant models from urban and labour economics and recent trends in employment and population suburbanisation the empirical evidence on spatial effects is examined this literature includes evidence on the effects of residential segregation residential suburbanisation and employment suburbanisation and direct measures of access such as travel times the most recent evidence suggests that spatial mismatch is relevant for explaining black white employment differences though the magnitudes of these effects remain unclear

intra metropolitan shifts in labor demand and the adjustment of local markets abstract i offer new evidence on the adjustment of local labor markets to geographic shifts in labor demand within us metropolitan areas using a unique data set in which metropolitan subregions are geographically matched across the 1970 1980 and 1980 1990 decades the evidence uncovered paints the following picture workers especially those with less education make incomplete adjustments within metropolitan areas in response to intra metropolitan demand shifts although blacks may not make especially limited adjustments they have disproportionately suffered deleterious effects from job movements because the demand shifts have tended to be away from their places of residence

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

spatial versus social mismatch the aim of this paper is to provide a new mechanism based on social interactions explaining why distance to jobs can have a negative impact on workers labor market outcomes especially ethnic minorities building on granovetter s idea that weak ties are superior to strong ties for providing support in getting a job we develop a model in which workers who live far away from jobs choose to have less connections to weak ties because of the lack of good public transportation in the us it is costly both in terms of time and money to commute to business centers to meet other types of people who can provide other source of information about jobs if distant minority workers mainly rely on their strong ties who are more likely to be unemployed there is then little chance for them of escaping unemployment it is therefore the separation in both the social and physical space that prevents ethnic minorities from finding a job

the mechanisms of spatial mismatch the spatial mismatch hypothesis smh argues that low skilled minorities residing in us inner cities experience poor labour market outcomes because they are disconnected from suburban job opportunities this assumption gave rise to an abundant empirical literature which is rather supportive of the smh surprisingly it is only recently that theoretical models have emerged which probably explains why the mechanisms of spatial mismatch have long remained unclear and not properly tested this article presents relevant facts reviews the theoretical models of spatial mismatch confronts their predictions with available empirical results and indicates which mechanisms deserve further empirical tests

an alternative approach to the analysis of wage differentials a key question in many studies of male female or black white wage differentials is how much of the differential can be explained by economic factors and how much remains unexplained the unexplained portion is then ascribed to discrimination since oaxaca 17 first formalized this decomposition the residual difference methodology has been the dominant methodology utilized in empirical studies of wage differentials 4 7 8 10 15 18 but recently the validity of the assumptions underlying the residual difference methodology have been called into question by butler 5 6 in this paper the theoretical underpinnings of the residual difference methodology are reexamined and an alternative theoretical framework for this methodology is suggested the new framework overcomes the shortcomings inherent in oaxaca s specification of the model and therefore provides a sound theoretical foundation for the residual difference decomposition

efficiency wages and the quality of job matching abstract we introduce the quality of job matching in the effort function in order to calculate the efficiency wage we consider two cases in the first one the quality of the match is perfectly observable by the firm and we show that the equilibrium unemployment level is due to both high wages and mismatch in the second case we assume that job matching is a random variable and we show that there are some regions in which the efficiency wage raise generates an effort greater than the initial wage increase and others where the reverse prevails

space and unemployment the labor market effects of spatial mismatch the aim of this article is to analyze the effects of housing discrimination on the wages and unemployment rates of black workers the unemployment effect is first analyzed using a simple minimum wage model an efficiency wage model is then adopted in order to endogenize both unemployment and wages under both models suburban housing discrimination leads to a higher unemployment rate for blacks in the central city than in the suburbs under the efficiency wage model black wages are also lower in the center the analysis thus generates a link between unemployment and a seemingly unrelated phenomenon racial discrimination in the housing market

cash in your face the cost of racial and ethnic discrimination in housing abstract according to recent evidence racial and ethnic discrimination in housing continues to be widespread this paper estimates the cost this discrimination imposes on black and hispanic households building on the work of 4 the paper develops a housing search model and measures the cost of discrimination by its impact on the gain a household can achieve through housing search the cost of discrimination is then calculated for a representative sample of households the punchline black and hispanic households pay a discrimination tax of almost 4 000 on average every time they search for a house to buy

search in cities the aim of this paper is to expose the recent developments of urban search models which incorporate a land market into a search matching framework using these models we will be able to explain why unemployment rates vary within a city how city structure affects workers labor market outcomes how unemployment benefits and the job destruction rate affect the growth of cities and why workers living far away from job centers search less intensively and experience higher unemployment rates than those residing closer to jobs we are also able to explain why as compared to whites black workers spend more time commuting to work but travel less miles and search for jobs over a smaller area

local labor markets job matching and urban location we present a new way of modeling local labor markets by linking the space of workers skills and the physical space of cities the key lesson of our analysis is that firms exploit workers in these two spaces by setting wages that are below the competitive level the degree of monopsony power depends on the elasticity of the firm s labor pool which is inversely related to the costs workers incur in commuting and acquiring skills our analysis thus shows how socioeconomic ghettos emerge as workers with poor skill matches are also those who incur the highest commuting costs

racial differences in residential and job mobility evidence concerning the spatial mismatch hypothesis abstract the spatial mismatch hypothesis asserts that job decentralization adversely impacts the labor market outcomes of african americans this paper tests whether race and job access have an independent effect on the probability of a joint residential move and job change no evidence is found to indicate that race directly influences the joint probability the paper finds however that poor job access has an independent negative effect on the probability of a joint residential move and job change because african american residences are heavily concentrated in american central cities these results suggest that african american workers may not be able to fully adjust as new jobs are created in the suburbs

minimum wage legislation in a dual labor market the paper studies the equilibrium effects of minimum wage legislation in an economy with coexisting primary and secondary labor markets owing to difficulties in monitoring relative wages and the threat of job loss play a functional role in eliciting effort from primary sector workers minimum wage laws hence affect the primary wage and employment level even if the law only binds in the secondary labor market furthermore interaction between the two sectors can also alter the secondary outcome relative to the standard analysis and has implications for participation decisions and for the level of unemployment

city structure job search and labour discrimination theory and policy implications we consider a search matching model in which black workers are discriminated against and the job arrival rates of all workers depend on social networks as well as distance to jobs location choices are driven by the racial preferences of households both blacks and whites consciously choosing to trade off proximity to neighbors of similar racial backgrounds for proximity to jobs because of coordination failures in the location choices multiple urban equilibria emerge there is a spatial mismatch equilibrium in which blacks reside far away from jobs and experience high unemployment rates and a spatial match equilibrium in which blacks are closer to jobs and experience lower unemployment rates under some reasonable condition we demonstrate that all workers are better off in the spatial match equilibrium we then consider two policies affirmative action and employment subsidies to the firms which hire black workers we show that the optimal policy requires imposing larger quotas or subsidies in cities in which black workers reside far away from jobs than in cities in which they live closer to jobs

urban diversity and economic growth at the risk of some simplification it is possible to identify four periods of intense study of cities by economists each of these has led to an increased understanding of the economics of urban areas and the unique role played by cities in the modem economy the first of these periods occurred in the decade after world war i only about ten years after the truck revolutionized the transport of goods within urban areas this period included the first systematic empirical analysis of the forces affecting the location of firms and households within cities robert murray haig 1926 and a number of other microeconomists at columbia analyzed the spatial pattems of manufacturing activity in lower manhattan and in the rest of new york city haig jmd his colleagues devoted considerable attention to where things belong in an urban area p 402 providing the first systematic economic analysis of urban spatial structure for example they analyzed the garment industry concluding that it was destined by nature to disperse north of 14th street and predicting that it would follow the estabhshed spatial pattem of the cooperage barrelmaking industry standardization in size and quality of barrels had meant that identical barrels could be made throughout the new york metropolitan area even in new jersey and the introduction of the truck meant that they could be transported cheaply throughout the region and exported the second of these periods though not in chronological order began in the mid 1960s it formalized many of the insights about location incentives within urban areas which had been uncovered a half century before mixed them with the logic of heinrich von thunen s 1826 ancient theories about agricultural crops and land values and applied them to the hotisehold sector the works of william alonso 1964

who benefits from local oil and gas employment labor market composition in the oil and gas industry in texas and the rest of the united states abstract this paper examines local labor market outcomes from an oil and gas boom we examine two main outcomes the probability of employment and the log wages of workers employed outside the oil and gas industry for texas and the rest of the united states across gender race and ethnicity we find that men and women gain employment in the oil and gas industry during booms but such gains are much larger for men and are largest for black and hispanic men we also find positive income spillovers for workers in other industries that are similar in magnitude across demographic groups

workforce location and equilibrium unemployment in a duocentric economy with matching frictions this article examines unemployment disparities and efficiency in a duocentric city where workers are non uniformly distributed between the two job centers we introduce commuting costs and search matching frictions to deal with the spatial mismatch between workers and firms in a decentralized economy job seekers do not internalize a composition externality they impose on all the unemployed with symmetric job centers a change in the distribution of the workforce can lead to asymmetric equilibrium outcomes we calibrate the model for los angeles and chicago metropolitan statistical areas simulations suggest that changes in the workforce distribution have non negligible effects on unemployment rates wages and net output but cannot be the unique explanation of a substantial mismatch problem

the role of spatial and skill mismatches explaining long term unemployment in paris in the paris region one can observe simultaneously the coexistence of a large and dynamic job pool with long lasting periods of unemployment this paradox reveals the importance of skill and spati

measuring racial discrimination with fair housing audits caught in the act a survey technique called a fair housing audit provides a direct measure of racial discrimination in housing this paper examines the econometric issues raised by audit data measures the discrimination uncovered by a 1981 boston study and tests hypotheses about the causes of discrimination the estimated level of discrimination is high black housing seekers are told about 30 percent fewer available housing units than are whites the hypothesis tests indicate that the primary cause of this discrimination is that housing agents illegally promote their economic interests by catering to the racial prejudice of their current or potential white customers