Beautiful city

Proponents of the City Beautiful movement advocated for sizable public investments in monumental spaces, street beautification, and classical architecture. Today, economists and policymakers see the provision of consumer leisure amenities as a way to attract people and jobs to cities. But past studies have provided only indirect evidence of the importance of leisure amenities for urban growth and development. In this article, Jerry Carlino uses a new data set on the number of leisure tourist visits to metropolitan areas to examine the correlation between leisure consumption opportunities and population and employment growth in metropolitan areas during the 1990s. His study suggests that leisure amenities are important for an area's growth, even after controlling for other characteristics, such as climate or proximity to a coast.Urban economics ; Cities and towns ; Leisure

Knowledge spillovers: cities' role in the new economy.

Jerry Carlino points out that cities, no longer centers of manufacturing, now serve as centers of creativity and innovation. The resulting “knowledge spillovers” are important components of today's economic growth.Cities and towns ; Patents

Employment deconcentration: a new perspective on America's postwar urban evolution.

In this study the authors show that during the postwar era, the United States experienced a decline in the share of urban employment accounted for by the relatively dense metropolitan areas and a corresponding rise in the share of relatively less dense ones. This trend, which the authors call employment deconcentration, is distinct from the other well-known regional trend, namely, the postwar movement of jobs and people from the frostbelt to the sunbelt. The authors also show that deconcentration has been accompanied by a similar trend within metropolitan areas, wherein employment share of the denser sections of MSAs has declined and that of the less dense sections risen. The authors provide a general equilibrium model with density-driven congestion costs to suggest an explanation for employment deconcentration.Employment (Economic theory) ; Cities and towns

The cyclical behavior of regional per capita incomes in the postwar period

This paper examines the cyclical dynamics of per capita personal income for the major U.S. regions during the 1953:3-95:2 period. The analysis reveals considerable differences in the volatility of regional cycles. Controlling for differences in volatility, the authors find a great deal of comovement in the cyclical response of four regions (New England, Southeast, Southwest, and Far West), which the authors call the core region, and the nation. The authors also find a great deal of comovement between the Mideast and Plains regions, but these regions are only weakly correlated with national movements. The cyclical response of the Great Lakes region is markedly different from that of the other regions and the nation. Possible sources underlying differences in regional cycles are explored, such as the share of a region's income accounted for by manufacturing, defense spending as a proportion of a region's income, oil price shocks, and the stance of monetary policy. Somewhat surprisingly, the authors find that the share of manufacturing in a region seems to account for little of the variation in regional cycles.Economic history ; Income

What explains the quantity and quality of local inventive activity?

The authors geocode a data set of patents and their citation counts, including citations from abroad. This allows them to examine both the quantity and quality of local inventions. They also refine their data on local academic R&D to explore effects from different fields of science and sources of R&D funding. Finally, they incorporate data on congressional earmarks of funds for academic R&D. ; With one important exception, results using citation-weighted patents are similar to those using unweighted patents. For example, estimates of the returns to density (jobs per square mile) are only slightly changed when using citation-weighted patents as the dependent variable. But estimates of returns to city size (urbanization effects) are quite sensitive to the choice of dependent variable. ; Local human capital is the most important determinant of per capita rates of patenting. A 1 percent increase in the adult population with a college degree increases the local patenting rate by about 1 percent. ; With few exceptions, there is little variation across fields of science in the contribution of academic R&D to patenting rates. The exceptions are computer and life sciences, where the effects are smaller. There is greater variation in the contribution of R&D funded by different sources-academic R&D funded by the federal government generates smaller increases in patenting rates than R&D funded by the university itself. This effect is somewhat stronger for federally funded applied R&D than for basic R&D. The authors also find small negative effects for cities with greater exposure to academic R&D allocated by congressional earmarks. ; They discuss the implications of these results for policy and future research.Labor market ; Patents

City Beautiful

The City Beautiful movement, which in the early 20th century advocated city beautification as a way to improve the living conditions and civic virtues of the urban dweller, had languished by the Great Depression. Today, new urban economic theorists and policymakers are coming to see the provision of consumer leisure amenities as a way to attract population, especially the highly skilled and their employers. However, past studies have provided only indirect evidence of the importance of leisure amenities for urban development. In this paper we propose and validate the number of leisure trips to metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) as a measure of consumers' revealed preferences for local leisure-oriented amenities. Population and employment growth in the 1990s was about 2 percent higher in an MSA with twice as many leisure visits: the third most important predictor of recent population growth in standardized terms. Moreover, this variable does a good job of forecasting out-of-sample growth for the period 2000-2006. “Beautiful cities” disproportionally attracted highly educated individuals and experienced faster housing price appreciation, especially in supply-inelastic markets. Investment by local government in new public recreational areas within an MSA was positively associated with higher subsequent city attractiveness. In contrast to the generally declining trends in the American central city, neighborhoods that were close to “central recreational districts” have experienced economic growth, albeit at the cost of minority displacement.Cities and towns

Monetary policy and the U.S. and regions: some implications for European Monetary Union

Under the European Monetary Union (EMU), member countries will be subject to common monetary policy shocks. Given the diversity in the economic and financial structures across the EMU economies, these common monetary shocks can be reasonably expected to have different effects. Little is known about what differences might arise, however, given the absence of any historical experience in Europe with a common currency. ; An alternative approach is to draw upon the historical experience of monetary policy's impacts on sub-national regions in the United States. Like the countries of the EMU, U.S. states and regions differ in industry mix and financial composition, while at the same time, they employ a common currency. Thus, the lessons learned from the U.S. experience provide valuable information about the potentially varied effects of a common monetary policy across EMU economies. ; In this paper, the authors use earlier findings to construct an index that ranks EMU countries by their likely sensitivity to a common monetary shock. The index indicates that countries fall into one of three groups: Finland, Ireland, and Spain are likely to be most responsive to monetary policy shocks; France, Italy, and the Netherlands will have a relatively small response; and Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, and Luxembourg are likely to have a response close to the EMU average.Monetary unions - European Union countries ; Monetary policy

From centralization to deconcentration: people and jobs spread out.

During the first half of the 20th century, people and jobs in the United States moved from rural to urban areas. After World War II, the U.S. saw other important shifts, including deconcentration - the movement of people and jobs from large, dense MSAs to small, less dense ones. This article looks at various aspects of deconcentration to see just how fast growth has been in less dense MSAs, whether trends for population and employment are the same, and whether the experience of MSAs in the frostbelt and sunbelt has been the same.Employment (Economic theory) ; Metropolitan areas - Statistics

Postwar period changes in employment volatility: new evidence from state/industry panel data

Many recent studies have identified a decline in the volatility of U.S. real output over the last half century. This study examines a less discussed and analyzed trend, but one as significant as the drop in output volatility, namely a substantial decline in employment volatility during the postwar period. Using a new panel data set covering industry employment by state since 1952, the authors find that a large decline in employment growth volatility began in the early 1950s and largely ended by the mid- to late 1960s. This study also illuminates the geographical dimension of the declines, an aspect that has heretofore been unexamined. The data indicate that all states have shared in the volatility decline, although the magnitudes have differed. ; A pooled cross-section/time-series model indicates that fluctuations in tate specific (state level differences in demographic and industrial composition) and macro variables (e.g., changes in monetary policy regimes) have each played a potentially substantial role in explaining volatility trends. The authors find that state-specific forces account for between 1 percent and 24 percent of the variations in employment volatility across time and space. Macro variables account for between 30 percent and 76 percent of the movements in employment volatility, a range broadly consistent with the findings of Stock and Watson (2002). An important finding of this study is that "unknown forms of good luck," in the form of smaller shocks to employment, account for between 1 percent and 10 percent of the observed fluctuations. This latter finding suggests a reduced role for unknown forms of good luck in describing the postwar decline in volatility compared to the findings in Stock and Watson's (2002) analysis of the variance of real output growth.Employment (Economic theory)

Trends in metropolitan employment growth

In the early part of this century, both employment and population tended to concentrate in large metropolitan areas such as New York. Over the past 40 years, however, jobs and people have spread out as both firms and workers have sought the lower costs of smaller, less congested places. In fact, Jerry Carlino argues that "congestion costs"--traffic, pollution, and a higher cost of living--are a major factor in the relatively slower growth of large metropolitan areas in the second half of the century.Employment (Economic theory) ; Metropolitan areas - Statistics