Comments on: Where Unemployment Is Worse than Expected

By: Geraldo Lenigan

Geraldo Lenigan — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 13:08:53 +0000

lessons learnt: it is all really about info security, good piece of great ideas.

By: Links: July 2009 « Consider the Evidence

Links: July 2009 « Consider the Evidence — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:02:13 +0000

[...] Where unemployment is worse than expected, by Richard Florida [...]

By: RetailChatr » Blog Archive » Commercial Real Estate in College Towns – Recession Proof?

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:44:03 +0000

[...] Kleen has a good post up today about the market stability of college towns. He references an article from The Creative Class which looks at unemployment rates in various cities. I’m going to stop short of saying that [...]

By: RS

RS — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:30:40 +0000

Yes, but not in this particular context. However, I do still wonder how useful it is to draw conclusions about which cities are doing better than expected when the expection is based only on the intial unemployment level, no controls for industrial structures, geographic location, ect. Futher, the spread of the data hints at bias in the coefficient estimate, which could drastically change the position and slope of that line. Thats all I was suggesting.

On an unrelated point, I am curious to know which city had the intial unemployment rate of 0 and a change of 0?

By: T

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:13:00 +0000

RS: Have you worked with models that include percentage change before?

By: Wendy

Wendy — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:34:58 +0000

Would be interesting to see the Canadian equivalent. My gut says the line might go the other way: places that had the lowest unemployment (such as Alberta) are seeing the biggest gains to unemployment.

By: Deep

Deep — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:59:32 +0000

I am impressed with Philadelphia having a low change in unemployment. However, I would like to see how the city of Philadelphia compared with the surrounding counties. My studies on Philadelphia tend to show the city to perform much more negativly than the suburbs. What concerns me, is that only 18% of Philadelphia residents hold a college degree (22% is the PA average), and has an unemployment rate of 6%, higher than the PA average.

That being said, I do think the city is poised to be the next big city. It has the ingredients to whether the recession and come out stronger. Infact I think it will be stronger than some of its suburbs.

By: RS

RS — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:33:27 +0000

I wonder how useful the predicted values really are… being that they are based on a model that explains only around 1/3 of the total variation, suffers from heteroscedastity (note the spread of the data around the regression line as you move right on the x-axis), and very likely spatial dependence.

By: Kevin Kleen

Kevin Kleen — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:21:51 +0000

Interesting data. I’m surprised the Oregon college towns (Eugene and Corvallis) aren’t better insulated. Why aren’t those metros doing significantly better than Boise, Medford, and Spokane?

By: Michael Wells

Michael Wells — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:05:38 +0000

What Portland and Oregon have in common with Detroit and Michigan is that their economies are heavy on manufacturing. Oregon is also a big lumber producer (officially considered manufacturing) and took a hit with housing and construction cutbacks.

My guess is that when the recovery comes (in whatever form), Portland will come back much faster than Detroit because we manufacture high tech and they manufacture cars. Microchips don’t need a radical overhaul while automobiles do.

The other thing affecting Portland is that people keep moving here without jobs. I don’t know the exact effect on the numbers, but it’s much different than the 1980’s recession when people were moving away, which reduced the number of jobseekers.