Search Results
Discussion Paper
Economic distress and resurgence in U.S. central cities: concepts, causes, and policy levers
This paper provides a review of the literature on U.S. central city growth and distress during the second half of the twentieth century. It finds that city growth tended to be higher in metropolitan areas with favorable weather, higher growth, and greater human capital, while distress was strongly correlated with city-level manufacturing legacy. The article affirms that distress has been highly persistent, but that some cities have achieved resurgence through a combination of strong leadership, collaboration across sectors and institutions, clear and broad-based strategies, and significant ...
Journal Article
Estimating U.S. metropolitan area export and import competition
This article estimates the extent to which the manufacturing sectors of U.S. metropolitan economies face competition from abroad and, in turn, how much they export overseas.
Working Paper
Postwar trends in metropolitan employment growth: decentralization and deconcentration
A key finding to emerge from this study is that the widely studied suburbanization or decentralization of employment and population is only part of the story of postwar urban evolution. Another important part of the story is a postwar trend of relatively faster growth of jobs and people in the smaller and less-dense MSAs (deconcentration). The authors find that postwar growth in employment (and to a lesser extent population) has favored metropolitan areas with smaller levels of employment (population) density. These trends are shared by major regions of the country and by manufacturing and ...
Working Paper
Location of headquarter growth during the 90s
This paper examines the location of headquarter growth of large public companies during the 1990s. Headquarters continue to be attracted by large metropolitan areas. Yet, among that group they continue to disperse into the medium-sized centers. The model results suggest that headquarter growth is elastic with respect to population growth. In addition, average January temperature emerges as a predictor of headquarter growth. Furthermore, the paper identifies 6 different categories of gross flows underlying the net change of headquarters observed during the 90s. There is strong variation among ...
Report
Assessing high house prices: bubbles, fundamentals, and misperceptions
We construct measures of the annual cost of single-family housing for 46 metropolitan areas in the United States over the last 25 years and compare them with local rents and incomes as a way of judging the level of housing prices. Conventional metrics like the growth rate of house prices, the price-to-rent ratio, and the price-to-income ratio can be misleading because they fail to account both for the time series pattern of real long-term interest rates and predictable differences in the long-run growth rates of house prices across local markets. These factors are especially important in ...
Journal Article
Suburban expansion
Census figures show that suburbs in the Eighth District are growing faster than they are for the nation as a whole
Working Paper
Where the headquarters are – evidence from large public companies 1990-2000
This paper examines the location of headquarter growth of large public companies during the 1990s. Headquarters continue to be attracted by large metropolitan areas. Yet among that group they continue to disperse into medium-sized centers. This paper identifies 6 different categories of gross flows underlying the net change of headquarters observed during the 90s. There is strong variation among the 50 largest metro areas in terms of the composition of these gross flows. On average, entry and exit represent over 2/3 of all gross flow activity. Pure relocation of headquarters is found to lead ...
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 ...
Journal Article
Does the federal tax treatment of housing affect the pattern of metropolitan development?
The U.S. tax code allows home owners to deduct mortgage interest and property taxes on their federal income tax forms. It also gives special treatment to the capital gains realized from the sale of owner-occupied housing. These advantages encourage investment in owner-occupied housing. But do these tax breaks have other, more far-reaching consequences? In this article, Dick Voith looks at how the tax code's special treatment of owner-occupied housing may affect metropolitan development
Journal Article
Educational attainment and recovery from recessions across metropolitan areas
Metropolitan area business cycles vary considerably in both magnitude and duration. Some metro areas recover rapidly from downtowns, some take longer, and some never recover. Because recent recessions have involved employment changes at the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) supersector level that were both cyclical and structural, part of a metro area's recovery from a recession may include the process of workers adapting to new jobs in other industries. If worker adaptation is part of the recovery process, then metro areas with higher educational levels might be able to ...