The paper investigates how the spatial evolution of core-based city regions affects the dynamics of income disparities across Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States between 1971 and 2010. Treating initially non-metropolitan counties as part of the functional economic system for the...

Since 1990, the United States has experienced a geographic dispersion of Mexican migrants from traditional gateways to new regions. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, we find significant differences in both the likelihood of remitting and the amount remitted by Mexican migrants...

We introduce new measurement tools to understand the sources of earnings differences across space. Based on the natural language employers use in job vacancy text, we develop granular measures of job tasks and of worker specialization. We find that jobs in larger commuting zones involve greater...

This paper uses birth records from California and mothers who move to quantify the absolute and relative importance of birth location in early-life health. Using a model that includes mother and location fixed effects, we find that moving from a below- to an above-median birth weight location...

Along with the oil price, concerns about the security of energy supply have soared once again in recent years. Yet, more than 30 years after the OPEC oil embargo in 1973, energy security still remains a diffuse concept. This paper conceives a statistical indicator that aims at characterizing the...

This paper’s framework for GDP in chained prices yields GDP in constant prices as a special case of constant relative prices, i.e., these GDP measures differ only when relative prices change. The framework has a novel additive procedure, counter to the prevailing view that GDP in chained...

This paper presents insights on U.S. business cycle volatility since 1867 de- rived from diffusion indices. We employ a Bayesian dynamic factor model to obtain aggregate and sectoral economic activity indices. We find a remarkable increase in volatility across World War I, which is reversed...

This paper considers the problem of measuring segregation when groups form a hierarchy whereby some groups have greater economic status than others. While existing measures of segregation address the case where people are unequally distributed across groups with the same economic status, concern...