Daniel Centuriao

Reverse commuting has a familiar monocentric meaning: travel from a central res- idential area toward suburban employment. Yet an origin–destination matrix does not identify a commute as reverse without first specifying the metropolitan hierarchy relative to which its direction is judged. We develop a network-based measure that uses the stationary structure of the full tract-to-tract commuting system to identify counter-directional flows. Under a conventional near-monocentric configuration with predominantly inward commuting, the measure recovers the familiar classification of outward trips as reverse. In polycentric systems, the same rule remains operational without requiring a unique CBD or a predetermined core–periphery boundary. Applying the method to U.S. Census LODES data, we show that network, distance-based, and local inflow–outflow classifications imply substantially different levels and geographies of reverse commuting across metropolitan areas. These differences demonstrate that empirical conclusions about commute direction depend materially on the urban hierarchy embedded in the measurement rule.

Using county-level Census of Agriculture panels from 2002 to 2022, this paper studies whether off-farm work stabilizes U.S. farm counts or accelerates the net loss of farms. We estimate county and Census-year fixed-effects models and instrument off-farm work with predicted private-sector labor demand accessible through commuting links. The IV results support a channel in which off-farm work stabilizes farm numbers. In the preferred specification, a one percentage-point increase in instrumented off-farm work raises five- year log farm-count change by 0.052 log points, equivalent to an implied 5.3 percent increase in farm counts over the Census interval and lowers the net loss of farm by 15.5 percentage points. The estimates imply that off-farm employment induced by commuting- linked labor-market access helps farms persist rather than facilitating exit. Policies that expand off-farm job access may therefore complement agricultural policy by supporting farm household viability.

We examine the effects of New York City’s Vision Zero program, which expanded the use of traffic calming and enforcement measures across the city. Combining geocoded policy locations with street-level collision data, we use spatial difference- in-differences to estimate local and spillover effects of automated speed enforcement cameras, speed humps, and Slow Neighborhood Zones. We find limited evidence of broad safety improvements within treated areas. The clearest effect is an increase in collisions on street segments surrounding automated speed enforcement cameras, while speed humps show no robust effects and Slow Neighborhood Zones exhibit suggestive increases in injuries just outside zone boundaries. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for spatial spillovers when evaluating urban traffic-safety policies.

This paper re-examines the aggregate modeling framework that captures both national markets (monetary and financial) and heterogeneous regional housing markets by re- specifying the macro-housing VAR in the HAVAR model of Fratantoni and Schuh (2003). Both the original (levels) and revised (rates) specifications of the 6-variable model affirm that housing remains more cyclically and interest sensitive than non- housing activity and capture the major developments in monetary policy and housing that altered timing and transmission since 1998. However, the rates specification is preferable on several dimensions and is consistent with an SVAR specification of a New Keynesian model with two heterogeneous sectors. An expanded macro VAR model that adds a financial variable and two more housing variables also fits the data well, thereby providing a solid foundation for an updated, revised, and expanded HAVAR model in future research.

Official outdoor recreation accounts are rarely available at the local scale, although land, infrastructure, and development decisions are often local. We develop a portable accounting method that recovers local outdoor recreation GDP, employment, and labor income from standard regional production accounts plus an explicit activity classification. Relative to full satellite-account construction, the method requires fewer data inputs and fewer unobserved allocation assumptions. Applied to West Virginia, the estimates are of the same order as the official state benchmark and reveal large county differences. The same accounting structure can be transferred to other countries or regions with sufficiently disaggregated regional accounts.

We study whether pre-existing social capital shapes local labor-market adjustment to the COVID-19 shock. We combine a pre-pandemic county social-capital index with a shift-share measure of COVID-19 exposure based on pre-pandemic industry structure and national industry employment declines. We find little evidence that social capital cushioned the initial employment shock. Instead, for a one-standard-deviation adverse shock, one standard deviation higher social capital improves the relative employment response by about 0.39 percent between impact and 2022–2023. Business dynamics point to lower job destruction, greater retention at continuing establishments, and less reallocation rather than stronger job creation at new establishments. Social capital appears to operate more as adaptive capacity than shock insulation.

Government expenditure has risen substantially over the past two centuries, but its long-run level and trajectory differ markedly across countries. This paper develops a dynamic political-economy model in which fiscal capacity is an accumulated state variable and current expenditure competes with investment in the government’s future ability to mobilize revenue. Institutional quality affects this tradeoff through two channels: it raises the productivity of fiscal-capacity investment, but it also strengthens the political discipline applied to expenditure choices that depart from fiscally sustainable benchmark. The model characterizes the interior expenditure policy, the steady-state equilibrium, and the locally stable transition path. It shows that stronger institutions unambiguously raise the expenditure level consistent with maintaining fiscal capacity, while their effect on equilibrium government size is generally ambiguous because the fiscal-capacity and political-discipline channels need not operate in the same direction. Initial fiscal capacity affects transition paths when the policy rule along the stable arm is monotone, and the model provides explicit conditions under which fiscal-capacity erosion produces a decline in government expenditure.