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

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

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

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 theory 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 only provided indirect evidence of the importance of leisure amenities for urban development. In this paper we propose and validate the number of leisure trips to MSAs as a measure of consumer 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 at 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.internal migration, amenities, urban population growth

Do states respond differently to changes in monetary policy?

Do the proportion of interest-sensitive industries, the number of small firms, and the concentration of small banks determine how monetary policy influences state economies? In this article, Jerry Carlino and Bob DeFina extend to the state level their earlier study that looked at these factors and their effects on a region's economies. Are the responses the same? Read the results of Carlino and DeFina's studyMonetary policy ; Regional economics

How strong is co-movement in employment over the business cycle? Evidence from state/industry data

This study measures the extent of co-movement in employment across states and industries at business-cycle frequencies. The strength of co-movement is quantified using the bi-variate and multi-variate measures of cohesion developed in Crous, Forni, and Reichlin (2001). The data indicate that cohesion is generally positive for the state/industry pairs, although the distribution masses around a relatively low value. The results suggest that cohesion has risen over time and that cohesion increases with spatial aggregation. Evidence is presented revealing that the measured degree of co-movement is sensitive to the chosen periodicity of the data and that there is much greater cohesion across states for a given industry than across different industries within a state. An investigation into the sources of cross-state variation in cohesion reveals that important determinants include the strength of input-output linkages within each state, the different effects of monetary policy actions on each state's employment, and the degree of industrial diversity within a state. No state-level support is found for Shea's (1996) hypothesis that industries that locate together co-move to a greater extent than do those that are more spatially diffused.Employment (Economic theory)