Cathy Yang Liu

Georgia State University | GSU · Department of Public Management and Policy

The rapid expansion of self-employment has accompanied the rise of a market economy in urban China. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the state-owned enterprises' share of the country's gross domestic product has declined from over 90 percent in 1978 to below 50 percent in 2005. Urban entrepreneurship and self-employment is a...

Two significant trends have occurred in urban areas across the United States during the last decade: immigration and the decentralization of employment. While each trend has been investigated by research, the magnitude of spatial imbalance between immigrant settlement patterns and employment location has received much less attention. Using a sample...

Utilizing Chinese data for the years of 1998, 2000, 2005, and 2008, this research traces the growth of the creative economy and the enlarging income inequality in China’s urban economy. While the creative sector now makes up close to 30 percent of China’s urban private employment, industry-based earnings disparity has also increased substantively....

: This paper examines the location and growth of creative industries within metropolitan areas. In recent years, the creative industries have been increasingly sought after as potential engines of metropolitan economic growth. Although some research has been done on the location decisions by such firms and workers, it has primarily focused on inter...

Using microdata from the U.S. Survey of Business Owners 2007, this study examines transnational activities of immigrant-owned businesses in three aspects: Whether they export, outsource jobs, and have overseas establishments. Results show that immigrant-owned firms have significantly higher tendency to be involved in transnational economic activiti...

Welcoming America, a nonprofit organization based in metropolitan Atlanta, has grown a membership network throughout the U.S. of nonprofit organizations and municipalities that present their communities as “welcoming cities” for immigrants. In 2018, Welcoming America launched the “One Region Initiative” to cultivate a concept of a “welcoming region...

This commentary reviews the challenges facing both U.S. workers and the central place of work in economic development. As the Great Resignation demonstrates, work is not working well for large portions of the population. The authors review the diversification of workers and the diversification of work arrangements in recent decades, noting the imme...

The U.S. nonstandard workforce remained at around 10% of the total employed population for the past decades, although the subnational levels reveal variation. Insufficient scholarly attention has been devoted to understanding its spatial distribution and associated causes. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing the contextual factors that help...

The COVID−19 pandemic brought the digital divide to center stage. This article investigates whether the crisis disrupted mobile broadband infrastructure, taking Georgia as a case study. We hypothesize that the pandemic could have slowed down ongoing infrastructure provision initiatives, as in other segments of the economy, or spurred them by bringi...

It is well documented that the U.S. metropolitan areas have experienced significant spatial, economic and demographic changes with increasing minority and immigrant population living in the suburbs. At the same time, minority-owned businesses saw substantial growth over the years and play important roles in local economic development. Using data fr...

In this chapter, we review the current state of knowledge on migrant entrepreneurship including various conceptual frameworks about entrepreneurial activities and urban development in the global cities in which migrant entrepreneurship occurs. We also provide a comparative analysis of migrant entrepreneurship in six global cities (Amsterdam, London...

As cities around the world continue to attract both international migrants and domestic migrants into their bustling metropolises, immigrant entrepreneurship emerges as an important urban phenomenon that calls for careful examination. This book assembles 12 chapters that represent case studies from 16 cities, which represent 14 countries and five c...

This book draws on evidence from global cities around the world and explores various dimensions of immigrant entrepreneurship and urban development. It provides a substantive contribution to the existing literature in several ways. First of all, it pursues a comparative approach, with case studies from both the global north and global south, so as...

State tax and nontax incentives have been widespread in the United States, though their efficacy in job creation and economic development has been repeatedly questioned in the literature by scholars and policy makers. Why, then, do states persistently pursue these incentive policies? Using the newly developed Panel Database on Incentives and Taxes,...

This article explores the implications of nonstandard employment for types of workers and their change over time. Using data from 1995, 2005, and 2017, we trace the evolving forms of nonstandard employment over the last decade and the associated job-quality patterns for workers with different skills, measured by education levels and occupation task...

Problem, research strategy, and findings: A growing number of cities, especially those outside traditional immigrant gateways, have sought to leverage immigrant resources to promote local economic development in recent years. Although some cities have explicitly included immigrant entrepreneurship as a focal area in their plans, we know little abou...

This paper examines food access disparity in relation to neighborhood diversity, especially race/ethnicity and poverty in a changing intrametropolitan spatial structure, using the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) as a case study. With detailed grocery store data, this study finds a substantive change in food access between 2003 and 2015...

Capitalist economic development and urbanization in recent decades has seen the rise of a knowledge-based economy and a widening income gap. Attempts to pursue a creativity-led urban development strategy amidst the ascent of a knowledge-based economy have led to the popularity of inclusive growth urban and regional policies. However, policy accepta...

Employment concentration among low-skilled immigrants is a well-documented phenomenon in the U.S. labor market though its temporal and spatial patterns are less well examined. With Census microdata, the authors trace detailed occupational niches from 1990 to 2010 for all immigrants, as well as Asian and Latino immigrants separately, to understand h...

China is experiencing rapid urbanization during which millions of migrants move from rural to urban areas. Recently, China initiated the national strategy of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” to tap into the innovative potential and promote entrepreneurial development among the general public, with rural migrants being one of the targeted grou...

Self-employment is an important path to economic mobility for immigrants and rural–urban migrants in megacities around the world. Their entrepreneurial spaces scatter across urban areas but can be susceptible to removal in the process of urban redevelopment and streetscaping efforts. This study chose the farmers' market, a typical scattered entrepr...

With rapid economic restructuring, large-scale population migration, and market-oriented housing commercialization, China’s urban residents have experienced increasing segregation in both residential spaces and workplaces. Using the sixth census (year 2010) data with detailed geographic information for Shanghai, we document the residential patterns...

In the face of continued immigration to the United States and federal policy inertia, many local governments have started to adopt their own immigrant-related policies to cope with the newcomers. Among them, welcoming cities represent a new wave of inclusive local government responses that seeks to incorporate immigrants socially and economically a...

This chapter sets out to analyze urban development and branding strategies for emerging global cities in China. It takes as its starting point that there has been a shift from a focus on economic dimensions towards a global city discourse in which various dimensions are at play, including economic, cultural, social and environmental. The empirical...

This edited collection examines seminal changes and major policy challenges in metropolitan governance in Asia and the Pacific Rim that are being faced by governments (national and sub-national) and their polities. The book builds upon the work of the largest stream at the Urban Affairs Association’s (UAA) Annual Conference (Urban Issues in Asia an...

Using microdata from the U.S. Survey of Business Owners (SBO) released in 2012, this study examines transnational activities of immigrant-owned businesses in three aspects: whether they export, outsource jobs, and have overseas establishments. Results show that immigrant-owned firms have significantly higher tendency to be involved in transnational...

Public sector employment of immigrants can increase their economic assimilation and potentially improve their treatment by government. Yet, as we show using Census data from 1990, 2000, and 2009–2011, immigrants are substantially underrepresented in federal, state, and local governments. To understand why, we use logit analysis for federal and for...

Disasters provide opportunities to change patterns of development, new resources to support those changes, and incentives to become more resilient and sustainable, reducing losses in future disasters. Policy inertia is broken, new voices are heard, constituencies are mobilized, champions emerge, and new development tools are brought to bear. Howeve...

The rapid increase of immigrant population in metropolitan areas across the United States brings significant changes to urban labor market. While many immigrants integrate into the formal labor market through participation in wage and salaried work, a substantive proportion of Latino and Asian immigrants are making their way into ethnic entrepreneu...

A comprehensive white paper version of this paper is available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2416518Immigrant-owned enterprises are an increasingly important part of the U.S. economy. According to the 2007-2011 American Community Survey (ACS), immigrants now comprise 20 percent of the high-tech work force and 17.3 percent of high-tech entrepreneurs....

Ethnic enterprises are growing rapidly in urban areas across the United States. Anecdotal evidence from around the country reports many success stories of how ethnic businesses transform communities; however, researchers have not provided a systematic review of the role of ethnic businesses in community developing. In practice, ethnic businesses ha...

Research on how the residential segregation of immigrant populations has impacted their labor market outcomes presents many challenges because of the fact that immigrants often choose to locate near co-ethnics to share resources and cultural amenities. Because not all immigrants choose to live in these ethnic communities, identification of a causal...

This article gauges the applicability of five urban paradigms derived from the urban experience of the Western world, especially from that of Los Angeles, to the urban realities of an East Asian city: Shanghai, China. The five metaphors — world city, cyber city, dual city, hybrid city and sustainable city — are each examined against Shanghai's urba...

Contingent workers are a large and increasingly important segment of the US labour force. This paper uses the Contingent Work Supplement of the Current Population Survey to gain some understanding of this workforce and to link that information to larger on-going annual and decennial surveys for sub-national-level estimation and analysis. A typology...

Immigrants continue to settle in metropolitan areas across the United States and bring significant changes to various urban labor markets. The current Great Recession which officially started in December 2007 and ended in June 2009 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2010) further intensified the debate on immigration. It is important to underst...

This study examines the causes and dynamics in the creation of business ventures by minority nascent entrepreneurs. Minority business enterprises are an important source of job creation and innovation in the US economy, as well as economic development engines in their respective communities. However, little is understood about the unique motivation...

This article investigates the determinants of Latino immigrants’ travel mode choices (auto alone, carpool, transit, and other modes) from six different immigrant gateways: Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of living in ethnically concentrated locations and working in ethni...

This study traces the geographic evolution of minority-owned businesses in sub-metropolitan areas across the United States and investigates potential factors that underlie their intra-metropolitan location shift. Using data from the 2002 and 2007 Survey of Business Owner, this study addresses these questions for Asian-, Black- and Hispanic-owned en...

Latino immigrants continue to enter low-skilled urban labor markets across metropolitan areas in the United States. This study provides a dynamic account of the employment competition between Latino immigrant and black workers in the context of an emerging immigrant gateway: the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area. This study identifies occupatio...

Using 2000 Census microdata for the Atlanta metropolitan area as a case study, this research investigates the effect of intrametropolitan opportunity structure and local area context, especially spatial structure, urban employment pattern, social environment, and ethnic concentration, on Asian and Latino immigrants’ incidence of self-employment....

 This article examines the formation, determination, and quality of employment concentration for low-skilled Latino immigrants. Comparative evidence is drawn from the three metropolitan areas of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Using 2000 Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), gender-specific ethnic niches where Latino immigrants disproportio...

The purpose of this article is to consider the promotion of the entertainment industries as a means to economic redevelopment in post-Katrina New Orleans. A comparative study is conducted with three other cities in the Southeast: Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; and Wilmington, North Carolina. The study begins by laying a theoretical foundation for...

This paper examines the impact of living in ethnic enclaves in different parts of a metropolitan area on low-skilled Latino immigrants' employment accessibility. It does so by comparing the employment status and commuting times of Latinos living in and out of ethnic neighborhoods in central city, inner-ring suburbs, and outer-ring suburbs in Chicag...

This paper examines the impact of living in ethnic enclaves in different parts of the metropolitan area on low-skilled Latino immigrants' employment accessibility. It does so by comparing the employment status and commuting times of Latinos living in and out of ethnic neighborhoods in central city, inner-ring suburbs and outer-ring suburbs in Chica...

This paper examines the effect of space and race/ethnicity on labor force participation outcomes among minority and immigrant youth in the Los Angeles metropolitan areas. This research contributes to the spatial mismatch literature by analyzing the differences between first and second generation immigrants in addition to exploring the role of race...

The article summarizes growth trends in occupied housing in the USA and in five individual states with the largest immigrant populations—California, New York, Florida, Texas and Illinois. The analysis covers the decades between 1970 and 2000 and documents the explosive growth of immigrant housing demand. Foreign-born households constitute increasin...

While immigrants comprise an increasingly important segment of the urban population, their travel behavior is not yet well understood. Some studies emphasized their greater reliance on public transit as compared to the native-born population, but other alternative transit modes, especially car-pooling, have not been adequately addressed. This paper...