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Journal Article
Industrial cities initiative: working paper summary
"Rust Belt" is an epitaph for cities large and small throughout America's midwestern and northeastern regions. It encapsulates social and economic changes: "population loss, rising crime rates, loss of union jobs particularly in manufacturing, White flights to the suburbs, and a generally declining urban environment," in which massive, but abandoned factories rusted away and scarred the landscape of once vibrant cities.
Conference Paper
Technology and the future of metropolitan economies
Working Paper
The agglomeration of R&D labs
This paper has been superseded by WP 15-03.<p>The authors document the spatial concentration of more than 1,000 research and development (R&D) labs located in the Northeast corridor of the U.S. using point pattern methods. These methods allow systematic examination of clustering at different spatial scales. In particular, Monte Carlo tests based on Ripley's (1976) K-functions are used to identify clusters of labs ? at varying spatial scales ? that represent statistically significant departures from random locations reflecting the underlying distribution of economic activity (employment). ...
Journal Article
Is state and local competition for firms harmful?
Journal Article
Declining manufacturing employment in the New York-New Jersey region: 1969-99
Between 1969 and 1999, the New York-New Jersey region experienced a steeper drop in manufacturing employment than any other area of the United States. Much of the unusually sharp job decline can be attributed to the geographic dispersion of manufacturing_that is, the gradual movement of manufacturing activity from the more urbanized and industry-intensive states of the Northeast to the less industrially developed states of the South and West.
Journal Article
Diversity of industry fuels economies
A strong mix of manufacturing, services, agriculture, and tourism industries make the Fifth District home to a varied economy.
Report
Have amenities become relatively more important than firm productivity advantages in metropolitan areas?
We analyze patterns of compensating differentials to determine whether a region's bundle of site characteristics has a greater net effect on household location decisions relative to firm location decisions in U.S. metropolitan areas over time. We estimate skill-adjusted wages and attribute-adjusted rents using hedonic regressions for 238 metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000. Within the framework of the standard Roback model, we classify each metropolitan area based on whether amenities or firm productivity advantages dominate and analyze the extent to which these classifications change between ...
Report
Localization of industry and vertical disintegration
We argue that the rationalization gains often predicted by static applied general equilibrium models with imperfect competition and scale economies are artificially boosted by an unrealistic treatment of fixed costs. We introduce sunk costs into one such model calibrated with real-world data. We show how this changes the oligopoly game in a way significant enough to affect, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the outcome of a trade liberalization exercise.
Report
Step-by-step migration to efficient agglomerations
Recent literature suggests that historical accidents can trap economies in inefficient equilibria. In a prototype model in the literature, there are two locations, the productive South and the unproductive North. By accident of history, the industry starts in the North. Because of agglomeration economies, the industry may reside in the North forever, an inefficient outcome. This paper modifies the standard model by assuming there is a continuum of locations between the North and the South. Productivity gradually increases as one moves South. There is a unique long-run equilibrium in this ...