Susane Leguizamon

Is “Gaytrification” a Real Phenomenon?:

Gentrification is an oft-sought solution to urban blight, and it has been proposed, for various reasons, that the presence of gays and lesbians is associated with an increased probability that an area will gentrify. Using census tract-level data from the 30 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) in the United States, we find that areas with more same-sex coupled households do, indeed, have a higher predicted probability of gentrifying from 2000 to 2010. A 1 percentage point increase in the number of same-sex coupled households is associated with an almost 2% to 3% increase in the probability of gentrification. We define gentrification as a change in the relative standing of a census tract with respect to average income and/or housing prices, and this finding is robust to various definitions of gentrification within these categories. This influence is persistent after controlling for family size, household income, the presence of different-sex, unmarried couples, and access to amenities.

Health insurance subsidies and the expansion of an implicit marriage penalty: a regional comparison of various means-tested programmes

ABSTRACT Any subsidy provision for healthcare premiums, including those embedded in Affordable Care Act (ACA), has the potential to result in some couples facing an implicit penalty when married relative to unmarried. To illustrate such consequences of means-tested subsidies of health insurance premiums, we construct hypothetical households earning different levels of income who are eligible for current subsidies in the USA. and compare the estimated implicit marriage penalty faced by these households to the one faced by low-income households who are eligible for various means-tested programmes (e.g. TANF, WIC, SNAP) for each of the 48 contiguous states. We find that, like very low-income households, marriage can potentially penalize couples who receive health insurance premium subsidies by decreasing their overall disposable income by as much as 14%. We find that the ACA increases the number of households subject to marriage penalties embedded in means-tested programmes for low-income couples. This distortion will exist for any future health insurance premium subsidies that are means tested at the household income level.

Revisiting the Link Between Economic Distress, Race, and Domestic Violence

Male unemployment may decrease the incidence of domestic violence, due to loss of economic power in the relationship, or increase the incidence of domestic violence, due to emotional outbursts fueled by increased stress. We hypothesize that Black men may face a greater loss of expected future earnings after an unemployment shock due to a more unfavorable labor market relative to White men. Consequently, we would expect that Black men would, on net, exhibit a greater reduction (or a smaller increase) in incidences of domestic violence following an employment shock. This study uses mass layoff events reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) at the county level (N = 3,377) for the years 2003-2008. Mass layoff events occur when a firm lays off at least 50 workers and are uncorrelated with individual-level characteristics (N = 28,939 events, affecting N = 5,337,481 individuals). Domestic violence data are taken from the National Archive of Criminal Justice and defined as occurring when an accused perpetrator is charged, but not necessarily convicted. We use a multivariate regression model to estimate how differences in the change in reported incidences of domestic violence by race correlate with changes in mass layoffs by race. We control for the poverty rate, real per capita income, percent Black, percent women, and percent of females laid off. The standard errors are clustered at the county level and include county and time dummies to account for regional and time specific trends. We observe that an increase in the number of Blacks subject to a mass layoff event do exert a negative associated influence on domestic violence while layoffs of White men exert a positive influence. Our results shed light on how the influence of economic uncertainty on incidences of domestic violence has been found to be positive in some previous research but negative in other research.

Who cares about relative status? A quantile approach to consumption of relative house size

ABSTRACT I estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) to live in a house near neighbours with relatively smaller (or larger) houses using housing transaction data. I find that consumers in the 50th and 75th percentile are willing to pay the most for an increase in relative housing consumption while consumers in the lower percentiles and the highest percentile yield a smaller, and statistically insignificant, WTP. This gives evidence to popular media reports that the middle class values relative status the most.

Spatial Spillovers of Land Use Regulation in the United States

Evidence of spatial dependence in land use regulatory levels was first found in Brueckner (1998) for California cities. Recent research has not incorporated this consideration despite the considerable consequences of the relationship. We seek to expand the empirical find ings to a current, larger and more diverse data-set for municipalities across the USA. Analyzing regulatory levels and their determinants from over 2000 municipalities, we find strong evidence of spatial dependence at the local level even after controlling for geographic and political influences. This suggests that political competition, rather than welfare maximization exclusively, may be influencing the level of regulations adopted.