#2007-046B "Urban Crime and Labor Mobility"
by Subhayu Bandyopadhyay, Santiago Pinto, and Christopher H. Wheeler
October 2007
Revised March 2008

We present a model of crime where two municipalities exist within a metropolitan statistical area (MSA). More...

#2007-045C "Human Capital Externalities and Adult Mortality in the U.S."
by Christopher H. Wheeler
October 2007
Revised January 2008

Human capital is now widely recognized to confer numerous benefits, including higher incomes, lower incidence of unemployment, and better health, to those who invest in it. More...

#2006-056C "The Economic Performance of Cities: A Markov-Switching Approach"
by Michael T. Owyang, Jeremy M. Piger, Howard J. Wall, and Christopher H. Wheeler
October 2006
Revised January 2007

This paper examines the determinants of employment growth in metro areas. More...

PUBLISHED: Journal of Urban Economics, November 2008, 64(3), pp. 538-50

#2006-055A "Trends in the Distributions of Income and Human Capital within Metropolitan Areas: 1980-2000"
by Christopher H. Wheeler, and Elizabeth A. La Jeunesse
October 2006

Human capital tends to have significant external effects within local markets, increasing the average income of individuals within the same metropolitan area. More...

#2006-039B "Neighborhood Income Inequality"
by Christopher H. Wheeler, and Elizabeth A. La Jeunesse
June 2006
Revised February 2007

This paper offers a descriptive empirical analysis of the geographic pattern of income inequality within a sample of 359 US metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2000. More...

FORTHCOMING: Journal of Regional Science

#2006-037B "Urban Decentralization and Income Inequality: Is Sprawl Associated with Rising Income Segregation Across Neighborhoods?"
by Christopher H. Wheeler
May 2006
Revised November 2006

Existing research has found an inverse relationship between urban density and the degree of income inequality within metropolitan areas, suggesting that, as cities spread out, they become increasingly segregated by income. More...

PUBLISHED: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Regional Economic Development, October 2008, 4(1), pp. 41-57

#2005-065A "Human Capital Growth in a Cross Section of US Metropolitan Areas"
by Christopher H. Wheeler
September 2005

Human capital is typically viewed as generating a number of desirable outcomes, including economic growth. Yet, in spite of its importance, few empirical studies have explored why some economies accumulate more human capital than others. This paper attempts to do so using a sample of more than 200 metropolitan areas in the United States over the years 1980, 1990, and 2000. More...

PUBLISHED: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, March/April 2006, 88(2), pp. 113-32

#2005-055A "Cities and the Growth of Wages Among Young Workers: Evidence from the NLSY"
by Christopher H. Wheeler
July 2005

Human capital-based theories of cities suggest that large, economically diverse urban agglomerations increase worker productivity by increasing the rate at which individuals acquire skills. One largely unexplored implication of this theory is that workers in big cities should see faster growth in their earnings over time than comparable workers in smaller markets. This paper examines this implication using data on a sample of young male workers drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort. More...

PUBLISHED: Journal of Urban Economics, September 2006, 60(2), pp. 162-84

#2005-033C "Local Market Scale and the Pattern of Job Changes Among Young Men"
by Christopher H. Wheeler
June 2005
Revised January 2008

In finding a career, workers tend to make numerous job changes, with the majority of ‘complex’ changes (i.e. those involving changes of industry) occurring relatively early in their working lives. More...

PUBLISHED: Regional Science and Urban Economics, March 2008, 38(2), pp. 101-18

#2005-017A "Job Flows and Productivity Dynamics: Evidence from U.S. Manufacturing"
by Christopher H. Wheeler
February 2005

Through their influence on the cross-sectional distribution of productivity across firms and workers, job creation and destruction likely have an impact on the rate at which aggregate productivity changes over time. While a broad consensus has emerged suggesting that job destruction enhances productivity by eliminating inefficient production units, theories disagree with regard to the effect of job creation. More...

PUBLISHED: Macroeconomic Dynamics, April 2007, 11(2), pp. 175-201