NBER Publications by Patricia E.. Beeson

To better understand the potential economic repercussions of a bioterrorist attack, this paper explores the effects of several catastrophic epidemics that struck American cities between 1690 and 1880. The epidemics considered here killed between 10 and 25 percent of the urban population studied. A particular emphasis is placed on smallpox and yellow fever, both of which have been identified as potential bioterrorist agents. The central findings of the paper are threefold. First, severe localized epidemics did not disrupt, in any permanent way, the population level or long-term growth trajectory of those cities. Non-localized epidemics (i.e., those that struck more than one major city) do appear to have had some negative effect on population levels and long-term growth. There is also ...

Despite the presence of anecdotal evidence linking regional economic growth and the presence of quality universities in such areas as the Silicon Valley in California and Route 128 in Boston, there have been few systematic studies of the relationship between universities and local economies. In this paper we examined the relationship between four measures of the quality or extent of activities of colleges and universities in an area and various measures of the local labor market activity, including employment, income and migration. We could not reject the hypothesis that there is no relationship between our measures of university activity and the overall employment rate in an SMSA. We did, however, find evidence that colleges and universities affect the composition of employment in an SMSA...