"Measuring neighborhoods in the new data economy."

Abstract:  The data economy in the United States has changed dramatically in the past 5-10 years.  Naively one might argue that this new data economy holds particular promise for academics, because revolutions in science are often preceded by revolutions in measurement.   But for social scientists who study cities in the United States these changes are mixed.  The new data economy is complex complicates the study of neighborhoods.  In this talk I'll describe one such complication - the replacement of the long form of the decennial census with the American Community Survey in 2010.  The ACS produces estimates for thousands of variables at a variety of geographic scales.  However, estimates from the ACS are terribly imprecise, for many policy relevant variables ACS estimates are almost unusable.  In this talk I’ll describe the quality of the ACS and use its shortcomings to motivate a discussion of changing the way we measure neighborhoods.  Rather than just talk about alternatives I’ll present results from two novel computational methods that leverage new ways of thinking about the measurement of neighborhoods.  One of these methods can be used to process existing public domain ACS estimates to dramatically reduce the margin of error.

"Race Matters: Income Inequality and Mobility from 2000 to 2013"

Abstract: Using unique linked Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Census Bureau data matched at the individual level, we examine the differences in levels and trends for income inequality across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Our data span 2000 to 2013, a period including the Great Recession, and will thus inform us on how financial crises affect inequality for important sub-groups of Americans. Previous research has focused on the increasing concentration of income and assets in the top decile of tax filers; this analysis will provide information on the entire distribution of income by decile, highlighting the circumstances of those at the lower end of the distribution as well. Because our data include both administrative and census data, our research is the first to provide detailed income and wage inequality information for racial and ethnic groups. Finally, we focus on short-run measures of mobility and document this measure over the decade and post-Great Recession era.

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"Precarious employment and fertility: Insights from Japan’s “Lost 20 Years”"

Abstract: In this paper, we examine relationships between precarious employment and fertility. We focus on Japan, a country characterized by a prolonged economic downturn, significant increases in both unemployment and non-standard employment, a strong link between marriage and childbearing, and pronounced gender differences in economic roles and opportunities. Analyses of retrospective employment, marriage, and fertility data for the period 1990-2007 indicate that changing employment circumstances for men are associated with lower levels of marriage while changes for women are associated with higher levels of marital fertility. These two offsetting relationships combine to limit the overall association between changes in employment circumstances and declining fertility. Results of counterfactual standardization analyses suggest that Japan’s total fertility rate (TFR) would have been slightly lower than observed if aggregate- and individual-level employment conditions had remained unchanged from the 1980s. We discuss the implications of these results in light of ongoing policy discussions about fertility promotion and academic debates about the changing nature of gender relations within the family.