arXiv subjects

Anthony Howell

Publications and source records attributed to Anthony Howell.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

An economic geography dataset of U.S. skill specialization, relatedness, and complexity

We release a new dataset of U.S. skill specialization, relatedness, and complexity, derived from 433.6 million job postings between 2010 and 2024. The panel covers 3,194 counties across 15 years and reports 201 variables that describe the volume of job postings (e.g., labor demand), the modality and nature of work (e.g., remote share, internship share), and the structure of employer skill demand by category (e.g., specialized, software, and common). We develop a suite of economic geography variables: skill-based measures of county specialization, relatedness, diversity, complexity, and dynamics. These measures are further decomposed by employer entity type (corporate, university, government, and federal lab), along with entity-pair measures of alignment, overlap, and directional skill gaps. An accompanying interactive dashboard supports both academic research and applied use, with features including spatiotemporal visualization, county rankings and trends, pairwise county comparisons, and individual county profiles.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review

Large language models (LLMs) play a growing but largely informal role in scholarly peer review. Yet whether LLMs reproduce biases observed in human decision-making remains unclear. We adapt a resume-style audit to scientific publishing, developing a multi-role LLM simulation (editor/reviewer) that evaluates high-quality manuscripts across the physical, biological, and social sciences under randomized author identities (institutional prestige, gender, race). Revealing author identities lowers reviewer rejection recommendations by roughly 25% of the mean rejection rate despite identical content, indicating that status cues beyond paper quality shape outcomes. Institutional prestige is the dominant cue: papers attributed to low-prestige affiliations receive lower quality scores in every field, a penalty that survives family-wise multiple-testing correction at the editor stage. Effects at the rejection margin are smaller and mostly fragile to correction, with one robust intersectional exception. Relative to male authors, female authors at low-prestige institutions receive lower reviewer quality scores and more rejection recommendations than those at high-prestige institutions. To probe mechanisms, we generate synthetic CVs for the same author profiles; these encode large prestige-linked disparities and an inverted prestige-tenure gradient relative to national benchmarks. The results suggest that domain norms and prestige-linked priors embedded in training data shape outcomes once identity is visible.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

From Pixels to Urban Policy-Intelligence: Recovering Legacy Effects of Redlining with a Multimodal LLM

This paper shows how a multimodal large language model (MLLM) can expand urban measurement capacity and support tracking of place-based policy interventions. Using a structured, reason-then-estimate pipeline on street-view imagery, GPT-4o infers neighborhood poverty and tree canopy, which we embed in a quasi-experimental design evaluating the legacy of 1930s redlining. GPT-4o recovers the expected adverse socio-environmental legacy effects of redlining, with estimates statistically indistinguishable from authoritative sources, and it outperforms a conventional pixel-based segmentation baseline-consistent with the idea that holistic scene reasoning extracts higher-order information beyond object counts alone. These results position MLLMs as policy-grade instruments for neighborhood measurement and motivate broader validation across policy-evaluation settings.

cs.CY↗