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

The economic role of cities in the 21st century

Jerry Carlino focuses on the economic activities that make firms in cities more productive and that make cities more attractive to urban households. Carlino finds that although agglomeration economies will continue to play a large role in the life of 21st century cities, modern cities must offer a wide choice of amenities to attract the type of high-skill workers needed in the new urban economy.Urban economics

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

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

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

The great moderation in economic volatility: a view from the states

Since the middle of the 1980s, economic growth in the U.S. has become much more stable than it was in the preceding three decades, and the magnitude of the decline is substantial. What accounts for the decline in volatility, and why is the decline important for policymakers? In “The Great Moderation in Economic Volatility: A View from the States,” Jerry Carlino discusses these questions and makes the case that using state-level rather than just national data offers a much larger testing ground for analyzing the decline in economic volatility.Economic stabilization

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 geography of research and development activity in the U.S.

This study details the location patterns of R&D labs in the U.S., but it differs from past studies in a number of ways. First, rather than looking at the geographic concentration of manufacturing firms (e.g., Ellison and Glaeser, 1997; Rosenthal and Strange, 2001; and Duranton and Overman, 2005), the authors consider the spatial concentration of private R&D activity. Second, rather than focusing on the concentration of employment in a given industry, the authors look at the clustering of individual R&D labs by industry. Third, following Duranton and Overman (2005), the authors look for geographic clusters of labs that represent statistically significant departures from spatial randomness using simulation techniques. The authors find that R&D activity for most industries tends to be concentrated in the Northeast corridor, around the Great Lakes, in California's Bay Area, and in southern California. They argue that the high spatial concentration of R&D activity facilitates the exchange of ideas among firms and aids in the creation of new goods and new ways of producing existing goods. They run a regression of an Ellison and Glaeser (1997) style index measuring the spatial concentration of R&D labs on geographic proxies for knowledge spillovers and other characteristics and find evidence that localized knowledge spillovers are important for innovative activity.Research and development ; Geography

Aggregate employment growth and the deconcentration of metropolitan employment

In this paper, the authors document that the disparity in employment densities across U.S. metropolitan areas has lessened substantially over the postwar period. To account for this deconcentration of metropolitan employment, the authors develop a system-of-cities model in which an increase in aggregate metropolitan employment causes congestion costs to increase faster for the more dense metro areas. A calibrated version of the model reveals that the (roughly) two-and-a-half-fold increase in postwar aggregate metropolitan employment implies, by itself, more deconcentration than actually observed. Thus, rising aggregate metropolitan employment appears to be a powerful force favoring deconcentration, although some benefit of greater employment density appears to have partially offset the effects of rising congestion costs for the more dense metro areas.Employment (Economic theory) ; Metropolitan areas - Statistics

On the evolution of the spatial distribution of employment in postwar United States

In this paper, the authors document a pronounced trend toward deconcentration of metropolitan employment during the postwar period in the United States. The employment share of initially more dense metro areas declined and those of initially less dense metro areas rose. Motivated by this finding, the authors develop a system-of-cities model in which increase in aggregate metropolitan employment causes employment to shift in favor of less dense metro areas because congestion costs increase more rapidly for the initially more dense metro areas. A calibrated version of the model shows that the more-than-twofold increase in employment experienced by MSAs during the postwar period was indeed a powerful force favoring deconcentration.Employment (Economic theory)