Digital Commons Network^™

Students have been described as being both particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and highly resilient in recovery. In addition, they often have been treated as a distinct, homogeneous group sharing similar characteristics. This research tests these ideas through an examination of hurricane-related perceptions and preparations of students in a hurricane-prone area. A survey of over 500 undergraduate students (15% on-campus residents, 85% off campus) was conducted at the University of South Florida, a large, metropolitan- based university located in Tampa Bay, Florida, near the Gulf Coast. Following Mann–Whitney and Kruskal– Wallis tests, results showed that students were ill prepared for …

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the natural topography of the United States to estimate the causal impact of inter-jurisdictional competition on income growth. We find that doubling the number of county governments in a metropolitan area leads to a 17% increase in the average annual growth rate of earnings per employee over 1969-2006, and a 10% increase in 2006 income per employee. Decomposing income effects using 2000 Census worker-level data, we find that approximately half of the effect stems from making workers more productive, while the other half comes from changing the composition of the workforce and inducing workers …