Peter Cho

This study revisits Hsieh and Moretti's (2019) research, extending the original 1964-2009 timeframe to 1964-2019. Using kernel density estimation for land use regulations, housing costs, and employment, we observe improvements in spatial labor misallocation from 2009 to 2019. Also, our study critically reviews the counterfactual estimation procedure of Hsieh and Moretti (2019) and proposes a potential enhancement: iterating the estimation until the indirect utility level equalizes across all locations. Using this new algorithm, we find a significant overstatement in the original estimation of aggregate output growth over 1964-2009 if housing costs were fixed at the 1964 level. Lastly, holding housing costs at the 2009 level, our counterfactual results indicate a 13.9 percentage point smaller output growth for the 1964-2019 period, confirming that spatial misallocation has indeed improved in the recent years.

This report examines the relationship between income levels and vacancy rates across Wisconsin using data from the 2020 American Community Survey. The analysis identifies geographic and economic patterns, highlighting counties with significant deviations from expected trends and emphasizing the substantial role of seasonal vacancies. Adjusted vacancy rates, excluding seasonal and migrant worker-related units, reveal disparities between adjusted and unadjusted rates, focusing on vacancies driven by economic factors. Additionally, mean-centering highlights within-county variations, pinpointing census tracts with disproportionately high vacancy rates. These findings provide valuable insights into Wisconsin’s housing market and propose targeted strategies to address regional disparities, including tract-level interventions and broader economic solutions for counties facing systemic challenges.

This interactive map visualizes the housing expenditure share of each census tract in the Albuquerque Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), New Mexico, based on the 2022 5-Year American Community Survey. The share is calculated by averaging household mortgage and rent expenditure shares, highlighting regional housing affordability. Census tracts where housing expenditure exceeds the national average of 33.3% are marked in red, those below this threshold are uncolored, and those with missing data are shaded grey.

Sexual assaults and rapes are the costliest types of crime above all other types of crime. Sexual crime leaves intangible costs to society and victims. This paper studies the impact of ridesharing services on the number of sexual crimes in Chicago. By using hourly-community area level ridesharing service pickups and crime data spanning from January 1st to December 31st of 2019, this paper shows that the increase in the ridesharing service is positively correlated with the number of sexual crimes and that the size of the increase in sexual crime varies in different areas of the city and time. The findings of the research can contribute to the policy implication in the ridesharing service industry.

In the late 20th century, the U.S. saw declining mortality rates for midlife and older adults, but from 1999 to 2013, a troubling trend emerged. Middle-aged non-Hispanic whites experienced a notable increase in all-cause mortality due to suicides, drug addiction, and alcoholism. This phenomenon, known as ”deaths of despair,” disproportionately affected those with lower socioeconomic status and extended to uneducated whites, as highlighted by Case and Deaton’s (2021) research. Our project explores how causes of death change over time and across demographic groups among midlife citizens and examines the extent of ”deaths of despair.” Our findings align with previous research, showing that cancer and heart disease remained the top two causes of death, but their overall proportion decreased over time due to the emergence of other diseases. Additionally, our research indicates that suicide, drug, and alcohol-induced causes of death are closely linked to the low-education group and non-white populations.

This paper will forecast the next 12 months' unemployment rate in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward (San Francisco Bay Area) metropolitan statistical area (MSA) from Octobe 2020 to October 2021 using the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The initial expectation of the unemployment rate is to decrease in the next 12 months, which is based on the expectation of increased economic activities and economic rebound after the development of vaccination.