Jonathan T. Rothwell

The Effect of Density Zoning on Racial Segregation in U.S. Urban Areas

The authors argue that anti-density zoning increases Black residential segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas by reducing the quantity of affordable housing in White jurisdictions. Drawing on census data and local regulatory indicators compiled by Pendall, the authors estimate a series of regression models to measure the effect of maximum density zoning on Black segregation. Results estimated using ordinary least squares indicate a strong and significant cross-sectional relationship between low-density zoning and racial segregation, even after controlling for other zoning policies and a variety of metropolitan characteristics, a relationship that persists under two-stage least squares estimation. Both estimation strategies also suggest that anti-density zoning inhibits desegregation over time.

Density Zoning and Class Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Objectives. Socioeconomic segregation rose substantially in U.S. cities during the final decades of the 20th century and we argue zoning regulations are an important cause for this increase. Methods. We measure neighborhood economic segregation using the Gini Coefficient for neighborhood income inequality and the poor-affluent exposure index. These outcomes are regressed on an index of density zoning developed from the work of Pendall for 50 U.S. metropolitan areas, while controlling for other metropolitan characteristics likely to affect urban housing markets and class segregation. Results. For both 2000 and changes from 1990 to 2000, OLS estimates reveal a strong relationship between density zoning and income segregation, and replication using 2SLS suggests that the relationship is causal. We also show that zoning is associated with higher inter-jurisdictional inequality. Conclusions. Metropolitan areas with suburbs that restrict the density of residential construction are more segregated on the basis of income than those with more permissive density zoning regimes. This arrangement perpetuates and exacerbates racial and class inequality in the United States.

Geographic Effects on Intergenerational Income Mobility

abstract Research on intergenerational economic mobility often ignores the geographic context of childhood, including neighborhood quality and local purchasing power. We hypothesize that individual variation in intergenerational mobility is partly attributable to regional and neighborhood conditions—most notably access to high-quality schools. Using restricted Panel Study of Income Dynamics and census data, we find that neighborhood income has roughly half the effect on future earnings as parental income. We estimate that lifetime household income would be

Explaining Nationalist Political Views: The Case of Donald Trump

635,000 dollars higher if people born into a bottom-quartile neighborhood would have been raised in a top-quartile neighborhood. When incomes are adjusted to regional purchasing power, these effects become even larger. The neighborhood effect is two-thirds as large as the parental income effect, and the lifetime earnings difference increases to

Scaling of patenting with urban population size: evidence from global metropolitan areas

910,000. We test the robustness of these findings to various assumptions and alternative models, and replicate the basic results using aggregated metropolitan-level statistics of intergenerational income elasticities based on millions of Internal Revenue Service records.

The Role of Invention in U.S. Metropolitan Productivity

The 2016 US presidential nominee Donald Trump has broken with the policies of previous Republican Party presidents on trade, immigration, and war, in favor of a more nationalist and populist platform. Using detailed Gallup survey data for 125,000 American adults, we analyze the individual and geographic factors that predict a higher probability of viewing Trump favorably. The results show mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support. His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration. On the other hand, living in racially isolated communities with worse health outcomes, lower social mobility, less social capital, greater reliance on social security income and less reliance on capital income, predicts higher levels of Trump support. We confirm the theoretical results of our regression analysis using machine learning algorithms and an extensive set of additional variables.

Racial Enclaves and Density Zoning: The Institutionalized Segregation of Racial Minorities in the United States

Larger agglomerations of individuals create a social environment can sustain a larger repertoire of intellectual capabilities, thereby facilitating the creation and recombination of ideas, and increasing the likelihood that interactions among individuals will occur through which new ideas are generated and shared. Relatedly, cities have long been the privileged setting for invention and innovation. These two phenomena are brought together in the superlinear scaling relationship whereby urban inventive output (measured through patenting) increases more than proportionally with increasing population size. We revisit the relationship between urban population size and patenting using data for a global set of metropolitan areas in the OECD and show, for the first time, that the superlinear scaling between patenting and population size observed for US metropolitan areas holds for urban areas across a variety of urban and economic systems. In fact the scaling relationships established for the US metropolitan system and for the global metropolitan system are remarkably similar.

Density Zoning and Class Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas*: Density Zoning and Class Segregation

At the regional scale, human capital and agglomeration forces are assumed to shape innovative capacity, but there are likely to be more direct channels like the development and commercialization of new products. This article examines the relationship between inventive activity and productivity at the level of U.S. metropolitan economies, using a patents database that links inventors to their residence. Examining the 1980 to 2010 period, we find robust evidence that patenting is correlated with and Granger causes higher productivity in metropolitan areas. A standard deviation increase in patents predicts a 6 percent increase in productivity over 10 years. Higher-quality patents enhance the effect. We attempt to identify a cross-sectional causal effect of patenting on productivity and wages using various historical instruments from the early 20th Century and controls for the selection of high-skilled workers into the area. Two-stage least squares regressions show an even stronger causal effect, but we can not rule out the possibility that historic advantages in manufacturing and scientific research continue to affect productivity through both patenting and some un-identified channel. We conclude that inventive activity plays an important role in regional prosperity.