Browsing by Subject "Cities"

People live and work in local markets spatially distinct from one another, yet space is absent from most economic models of the national labor market. Workers choose the markets in which they will participate, but there are costs to mobility. Furthermore, cities are heterogeneous in a number of dimensions, including their local labor market productivity, their housing supply, and their offering of amenities.

I examine the impact of these spatial considerations on the dynamics of local labor markets and the national market to which they aggregate. First I study the patterns of location choice through a gravity model of migration applied to rich panel data from the U.S. I find that location choices respond to temporal shocks to the labor market, but only after controlling for local heterogeneity. Next, with this result as motivation, I turn to development of a dynamic spatial equilibrium of the national labor market. I make a technical contribution to work in dynamic equilibrium modeling by empirically implementing an island economy model of worker mobility. I quantify the importance of worker mobility costs versus local housing prices for explaining spatial variation in the unemployment rate. I find that the link between the local housing market and the local labor market is important for explaining the spatial dispersion in unemployment, but mobility costs are not. Finally, I further exploit the dynamic equilibrium framework to examine the effect of local housing policy on labor market growth. I find that housing supply regulation is a constraint to growth, but is only binding on cities that are particularly desirable because of their labor market opportunities or amenities. I find that some lightly regulated markets have a contingent of population that has been pushed out of more regulated markets by high housing prices.

A fire in Salem, Mass., in 1914 and an explosion in Halifax, N.S., in 1917 provide an opportunity to explore working-class institutions and organizations in the United States-Canada borderlands. In a historical moment in which the state greatly expanded its responsibility to give protection and rescue to its citizens, after these two disasters ordinary survivors preferred to depend on their friends, neighbors, and family members. This dissertation examines which institutions--including formal organizations like unions and fraternal societies as well as informal groups like families and neighborhoods--were most relevant and useful to working-class survivors. Families, neighbors, friends, and coworkers had patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity that they developed before crisis hit their cities. Those traditions were put to unusual purposes and extreme stress when the disasters happened. They were also challenged by new agents of the state, who were given extraordinary powers in the wake of the disasters. This dissertation describes how the working-class people who most directly experienced the disasters understood them and their cities starkly differently than the professionalized relief authorities.

Using a wide array of sources--including government documents, published accounts, archived ephemeral, oral histories, photographs, newspapers in two languages, and the case files of the Halifax Relief Commission--the dissertation describes how elites imposed a progressive state on what they imagined to be a fractured and chaotic social landscape. It argues that "the people" for whom reformers claimed to speak had their own durable, alternative modes of support and rescue that they quickly and effectively mobilized in times of crisis, but which remained illegible to elites. By demonstrating the personal, ideological, political, and practical ties between New England and Nova Scotia and Quebec, it also emphasizes the importance of studying American and Canadian history together, not only comparatively but as a transnational, North American whole.