Developing Freight Analysis Zones at a State Level: A Cluster Analysis Approach

The ability to forecast freight to support transportation infrastructure decisions is limited by data availability at a level of detail meaningful to the transportation planner. The Freight Analysis Framework Version 2 is a national, comprehensive public freight database. The difficulty that transportation planners encounter when using this data is due to extensive aggregation. In this paper, the authors develop a methodology for creating freight analysis zones (FAZs) at a sub-state level by partitioning a state into meaningful zones that support freight transportation planning and analysis. The authors conc

Search Time, Unemployment, and the Migration Decision

Several studies have shown that the unemployed in distressed regions of the U.S. have been reluctant to move to areas of greater employment opportunities. By establishing a negative correlation between weeks of job search and the probability of migration, this study is able to provide a partial explanation for the lack of a positive and statistically significant relationship between out-migration rates and the unemployment rate in the local labor market. It is our contention here that those regions that have experienced long periods of high unemployment possess a long-term unemployed population that is less likely to undertake a geographic move.

Developing Freight Analysis Zones at a State Level: A Cluster Analysis Approach

The ability to forecast freight to support transportation infrastructure decisions is limited by data availability at a level of detail meaningful to the transportation planner. The Freight Analysis Framework Version 2 is a national, comprehensive public freight database. The difficulty that transportation planners encounter when using this data is due to extensive aggregation. In this paper, the authors develop a methodology for creating freight analysis zones (FAZs) at a sub-state level by partitioning a state into meaningful zones that support freight transportation planning and analysis. The authors conclude that FAZs can be used effectively without degrading the quality of the forecasts

Composition, Similarity, and the Measurement of Economic Homogeneity

The concept of economic homogeneity in regional science is based on two very different notions: composition and similarity. In the case of the states of the US, measures of homogeneity based on these different notions are "negatively" correlated with each other, suggesting that the results of studies that use measures of economic homogeneity are likely to be sensitive to the conceptual basis of the specific measure. In order to overcome this problem, a portfolio-theoretic measure of economic homogeneity with some attractive properties is presented. It is naturally decomposable into two components reflecting each of these notions and easy to construct using widely available data. Using this measure, patterns of homogeneity for the states of the US are illustrated and discussed, and hypotheses about the relationship between homogeneity and economic instability are tested. Copyright Blackwell Publishers, 2005