California Voting and Suburbanization Patterns: Implications for Transit Policy, MTI Report 12-05

Public transit is an environmentally friendly transportation mode that usually focuses on transporting people within and to the city center. However, over the last 60 years, population and employment has been suburbanizing. As the median voter lives further from the city center, and thus enjoys fewer benefits from accessing public transit, does this reduce such a voter’s propensity to support public investment in public transit improvements? We analyze voting patterns on 20 transit-related ballot propositions from state-wide elections in California between 1990 and 2010. Controlling for demographic, socio-economic and political ideological factors, we focus on the role of suburbanization as a possible causal factor in determining public support for public transit investment. The results provide a rich picture of the attitudes towards transportation policy among California voters, and will help policy makers to better understand citizen preferences and to better predict how future trends will shift support towards or against transit. Finally, we suggest ways policy makers can use urban land markets to increase support for trans

The Impact of Center City Economic and Cultural Vibrancy on Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transportation, Research Report 11-13

Urban planners and scholars have focused a great deal of attention on understanding the relationship between the built environment and transportation behavior. However, other aspects of the urban environment – including the vibrancy and quality of life in urban areas – have received little attention. This report seeks to close this gap by analyzing the effects of both land-use and urban vibrancy on transportation patterns. Analysis of data from a variety of sources suggests that in addition to the built-environment, the vibrancy of the urban environment also affects transportation behavior. Moreover, vibrancy affects land-use patterns. By integrating objective measures of center-city quality of life into transportation choice models, our new statistical results inform public policy. We discuss specific public policy options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing public transit use

Estimating Housing Demand with an Application to Explaining Racial Segregation in Cities

We present a three-stage estimation procedure to recover willingness to pay for housing attributes. In the first stage, we estimate a non-parametric hedonic home price function. Second, we recover each consumer's taste parameters for product characteristics using first order conditions for utility maximization. Finally, we estimate the distribution of household tastes as a function of household demographics. As an application of our methods, we compare alternative explanations for why blacks choose to live in center cities while whites suburbanize.

From John Lindsay to Rudy Giuliani: the decline of the local safety net?

This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 4, "Economic inequality and local public services." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The authors contend that the future scope of city-based redistributive policies is limited. An important way in which policymakers work to reduce inequality is by redistributing income from the wealthy to the poor, channeling income tax revenue into spending on welfare and other services. The authors suggest, however, that New York City and other cities have had to scale back their redistributive policies. New York City's evolution from a manufacturing city to a service city accounts for more than one-third of the reduction in redistribution, because businesses in the service sector are more mobile and are therefore harder to tax than those in manufacturing. In addition, the authors document a more general decline in the relationship between land area and redistribution. In 1970, cities with greater land area tended to redistribute more income, but by 1990, this connection was no longer evident. The authors attribute this change to an erosion in the market power of large cities and observe that increased mobility and the existence of edge cities have contributed to a decline in the monopoly power once enjoyed by large cities.Public policy ; Public welfare ; Income distribution ; Income

Shame and Ostracism: Union Army Deserters Leave Home

During the Civil War not all men served honorably and this was known by everyone in their communities. We study how shame and ostracism affect behavior by examining whether men who deserted from the Union Army, and who faced no legal sanctions once the war was over, returned home or whether they moved and re-invented themselves. We build a unique panel data set that provides us with a control group for deserters because we can identify men who deserted but then returned to fight with their companies. We find that, compared to non-deserters and returned deserters, deserters were more likely to move both out of state and further distances. This effect was stronger for deserters from pro-war communities. When deserters moved they were more likely to move to anti-war states than non-deserters. Our study provides a rare test of the empirical implications of emotion. While both shame and ostracism would push deserters out of their home community, we find no evidence that deserters faced economic sanctions.

Decentralized Employment and the Transformation of the American City

This paper examines the decentralization of employment using zip code data on employment by industry. Most American cities are decentralized--on average less than 16 percent of employment in metropolitan areas is within a three mile radius of the city center. In decentralized cities, the classic stylized facts of urban economics (i. e. prices fall with distance to the city center, commute time rise with distance and poverty falls with distance)no longer hold. Decentralization is most common in manufacturing and least common in services. The human capital level of an industry predicts its centralization, but the dominant factor explaining decentralization is the residential preferences of workers. Political borders also impact employment density which suggests that local government policies significantly influence the location of industry.

Power Couples: Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940-1990

The rise of the dual career household is a recent phenomenon spurred by the increase in married women's labor force participation rates and educational attainment rates. Compared to traditional households these households must solve a colocation problem. This paper documents trends in locational choice between large and small metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan areas by household type from 1940 to 1990. We find that college educated couples are increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas and attribute at least half of this increase to the growing severity of the colocation problem. We also find that the relative returns for a college-educated couple of being in a large relative to a small city have increased across decades. Our results suggest that because skilled professionals are increasingly bundled with an equally skilled spouse, smaller cities may experience reduced inflows of human capital relative to the past and therefore become poorer. We examine how the relationship between rankings of university graduate programs and city size has changed between 1970 and 1990 to provide suggestive evidence on the importance of city size to firms' ability to attract the best workers.

Cowards and Heroes: Group Loyalty in the American Civil War

What motivated men to risk death in the most horrific war in U.S. history when pay was low and irregular and military punishment strategies were weak? In such a situation creating group loyalty by promoting social capital is of paramount importance and in the Civil War was the cement of both armies. We find that individual and company socio-economic and demographic characteristics, ideology, and morale were important predictors of group loyalty in the Union Army. Company characteristics were more important than ideology or morale. Soldiers in companies that were more homogeneous in ethnicity, occupation, and age were less likely to shirk.