Exogenous Workplace Choice in Residential Location Models: Is the Assumption Valid?

This paper examines the assumption implicit in most models of residential location that the choice of workplace is exogenously determined. Monocentric models have generally made this assumption, but it has come under increasing scrutiny. A nested logit model of workers' choices of workplace, residence, and housing tenure within the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area is developed to provide a test. A unique dataset that includes the workplace and residence census tracts of workers in Dallas-Fort Worth, and their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, is used to estimate the model. The results confirm that a joint choice specification better represents actual choice behavior in a multinodal metropolis.     

THE 1987 STOCK MARKET CRASH AND NEW YORK CITY EMPLOYMENT: AN INTERVENTION-MULTIPLIER ANALYSIS*

ABSTRACT. Intervention analysis is used to assess the impact of the October 1987 stock market crash upon employment in the securities industry in New York City. The results indicate that the crash has led to a gradual, but permanent reduction of approximately 25,000 jobs in this industry through July 1990. Using a dynamic location quotient methodology to measure basic employment, an estimate of a partial-adjustment economic base multiplier suggests that total New York City employment is likely to decline by over 100,000 as a result of the crash and subsequent adjustments in the securities industry.     

PETS OR MEAT: CLASS,IDEOLOGY, AND SPACE IN ROGER & ME*

This paper offers a reading of Michael Moore's docu-comedy, Roger & Me, a film ostensibly chronicling the director's effort to interrogate General Motors Chairman Roger Smith following massive plant closures in and around Flint, Michigan in the 1980s. Our analysis focuses on four key themes: (1) the status of “community” as an ideological lever both prior and subsequent to GM's layoffs; (2) the spatial consequences of economic restructuring, expressed most formidably in the division between public and private space; (3) the charge that Moore's film suffers from a lack of objectivity; and (4) the notable absence of any significant representation of labor resistance to the plant closures. The film's themes, we argue, coalesce in an emblematic sequence involving Rhonda Britton, a woman who sells rabbits as both pets and meat. The paper concludes by calling for increased attention on the part of geographers to filmic portrayal, and, more generally, to all forms of representation and the issues which surround them.     

Approaches to Interpreting Mesolithic Mobility and Settlement in Britain and Ireland

The Mesolithic communities of northwest Europe have generally been considered inherently mobile, and all the material evidence associated with them has been interpreted accordingly. This has resulted in entrenched, theoretically polemical and largely hypothetical mobility models, focusing on seasonal rounds and extraction activities. However, recent reanalyses of the ethnographic sources, and discoveries of both substantial and ephemeral Mesolithic structures, as well as new data from recent innovative lithic and scientific analyses (including DNA, isotope research on human remains, and geochemical analyses of lithic artefacts), have forced us to rethink the rather static models of Mesolithic mobility strategies. This paper, examining Mesolithic hunter-gatherer mobility and settlement models from Britain and Ireland, is part of that reassessment. In particular, it assesses the impact of the multiple lines of consilience on our understanding of Mesolithic habitation of landscapes. These include the archaeological evidence and the efficacy of recent theoretical and methodological approaches that have been employed to interpret it.