PSTC Research: Spatial Inquiry
Spatial Inquiry is a long-standing area of strength for the PSTC. This signature area incorporates the several PSTC disciplines. Research linked to this thematic area spans a wide range of population phenomena that examine human behavior with respect to context and place. Projects range from microlevel longitudinal studies of migration to patterns of urbanization in developing societies to the role of policies in shaping the outlines and settlement patterns of US cities.
The establishment of Brown’s research initiative in Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4, see www.s4.brown.edu) has, furthermore, made this thematic area one of growth. Today active areas of research include migration, social networks, and social adjustment; urbanization; neighborhood effects; and spatial methods.
Projects in the Spatial Inquiry thematic area include:
Project Title: Understanding the City Size Wage Gap
PSTC Investigators: Nathaniel Baum-Snow
Funding: NSF
Description: In 2000, hourly wages of prime-age men were 31 percent higher in metropolitan areas of over 2.5 million people than those of less than 100 thousand people. Moreover, the relationship between wages and population was monotonically increasing by about 1 percentage point for each additional 100 thousand in population over the full range of metropolitan area size. This monotonic relationship is robust to controls for age, schooling and labor market experience. The existence of this city size wage gap implies that workers are more productive in larger cities. Otherwise, firms in large cities would migrate to locations with lower costs. The investigators propose a research program to improve our understanding of the causes of the city size wage and productivity gaps. They propose a labor market search model that incorporates endogenous migration between large and small cities. This model is sufficiently rich to allow for recovery of the underlying ability distributions of workers by city size, arrival rates of job offers by ability and location, and returns to experience by ability and location, when structurally estimated using longitudinal data. These estimates will facilitate a more complete empirical decomposition of the city size wage gap than is possible using results in existing research. Perhaps more importantly, this line of research will produce new empirical evidence on the relative importance of various mechanisms by which larger cities are more productive.Project Title: Population and Economic Recovery in Coastal Aceh: Aid and Village Institutions
Principal Investigators: Vernon Henderson (PI), Andrew Foster
Funding: NIH
Other Research Areas: Social Behavior and Health, Population and Environment
Description:This project will develop and test a series of inter-connected theories about the economic, social, and political processes that influence the recovery from large-scale losses of population and economic assets following a natural disaster. A key element is to evaluate the impact of external aid and the form of aid delivery on local behaviors, networks and institutions, as well as long term growth and inequality. The analysis focuses on coastal villages in Aceh, Indonesia, that were differentially affected by the 2004 tsunami, and will make use of a panel data set (initiated in 2005) of 111 villages and 550 fishing boat owners that contains rich detail on local economic and political institutions, interaction of villages with external institutions, population change, and trauma suffered. A subsequent round of the survey using previously committed resources is now being collected, which adds another 100 villages and 200 new boat owners. We propose two additional rounds of the survey, creating a panel from 2005 to 2013. The project brings together USA and Indonesian experts on issues of community development, health, the environment, political economy, and inequality.
Project Title: State Investments in the Transition to Adulthood
PSTC Investigators: Dennis Hogan
Funding: NSF
Other Research Areas: Social Behavior and Health
Description: This research will produce information about the school factors at each age level of education that are the most important for successful state economic development strategies, and the extent to which state investments in education would improve state capacities for economic, especially high technology, job growth.Project Title: AOC: Disaster, Resilience, and the Built Environment
PSTC Investigators: John Logan
Funding: NSF
Other Research Areas: Families and Households, Population and Environment
Description: This project studies the resilience of the built environment in coastal communities that are subject to chronic wind and water damage from hurricanes. It continues and extends well beyond the scope of a current research project on the impacts of Hurricane Katrina, which has identified the places that were most affected, including urban neighborhoods and rural counties, and has begun to trace the process of recovery. This part of the study will include the four-year period 2005-2009 to determine 1) the extent of recovery in New Orleans and the Mississippi Coast, 2) the national pattern of displacement of residents and their assimilation into other places, 3) the redistribution of population by race and class within the New Orleans metropolitan region, and 4) the nature and effectiveness of neighborhood participation in redevelopment decisions.Project Title: Incorporating Immigrants and Minorities into Late 19th Century Cities
PSTC Investigators: John Logan
Funding: NIH
Description: This project will study racial and ethnic differentiation in U.S. cities in 1880, with a particular emphasis on the relationships between people and places. The project will use full-count census data from the U.S. Census of Population in 1880 to create a wide range of summary files, aggregating information at levels of geography including the enumeration district, city or town, county, metropolitan region, and state.Project Title: Social Networks and Mobility in Dynamic Economies
PSTC Investigators: Kaivan Munshi
Funding: NSF
Other Research Areas: Social Behavior and Health
Description: This project will study how social networks might support individual mobility, and facilitate economic activity more generally, in a dynamic environment.Project Title: Children's Health and Nutrition, Adult Outcomes, and Intergenerational and Spatial Mobility
PSTC Investigators: Mark Pitt
Funding: NIH
Other Research Areas: Families and Households, Social Behavior and Health
Description: This project will assemble, collect and analyze multiple rounds of survey data from Bangladesh, providing family-based and individual panel information on the long-term health and productivity effects of childhood nutritional intakes, indoor air pollution, and health interventions over a 25-year span, using a newly-available panel survey as well as a proposed additional survey round.Project Title: Measuring Social Connection and Children's Well-Being Using Multiple Data Sources
PSTC Investigators: Nicholas Townsend, John Logan
Funding: NIH
Other Research Areas: Families and Households, Social Behavior and Health
Description: This research will develop improved measures of social connection through coordinated analyses of intensive ethnographic data and a longitudinal demographic data about the same population in a rural area of South Africa. A great volume of research conducted in various contexts demonstrates that social connection is an important determinant of well-being measured by outcomes such as education, nutritional status, employment prospects, access to health care, and support of the aged and infirm. The most common measure of social connection in population and public health research is co-residence, which has critical limitations. Failure to attend to the full range of social relationships limits our ability to understand the social context of health and well-being. To redress this failure, we will use existing ethnographic data and longitudinal demographic data from rural South Africa to develop new measures of social connection that can be used in social surveys.Project Title: Urbanization, Health, and Environmental Quality in Coastal Ghana
PSTC Investigators: Michael White, Stephen McGarvey
Funding: NIH
Other Research Areas: Social Behavior and Health, Population and Environment, African Demography
Description: This project draws upon existing links among three currently collaborating institutions to examine the social and demographic processes closely linked to health and environmental health risks and how these influence local thinking about environmental issues. See the Project website for more comprehensive information.