Search Results
Journal Article
Definitions Matter: The Rural-Urban Dichotomy
District Digest article titled: Definitions Matter: The Rural-Urban Dichotomy
Journal Article
Upfront: New from the Richmond Fed’s Regional Matters blog
Roll up of several Regional Matters Blog Posts
Journal Article
How the Pandemic Influenced Trends in Domestic Migration across U.S. Urban Areas
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, net domestic migration in the United States was generally increasing in smaller urban areas while declining in the largest urban areas; as people sought to mitigate exposure to COVID-19 and avoid stricter lockdown measures, the pandemic may have accelerated this trend. Changes in domestic migration trends may influence the longer-term growth prospects of places, but investigating recent trends in domestic migration can be challenging because data from official government sources are released with a long lag.Jason P. Brown and Colton Tousey overcome this lag by ...
Journal Article
Population Turnover and the Growth of Urban Areas
People in the United States are relocating nearly half as much they did in the early 1980s. Lower population turnover—the propensity of people to move into or out of a given location—may mean a decline in labor market adjustment across industries and occupations; when people move across regions for job-related reasons, they may help smooth out changes that hit certain labor markets harder than others. Population turnover may also lead to better matches between employer and employee, an important factor in the growth of urban areas.Jason P. Brown and Colton Tousey examine the relationship ...
Journal Article
The Widening Divide in Business Turnover between Large and Small Urban Areas
Business turnover?the rate at which new firms enter and old firms exit the economy?has been declining for at least 40 years in the United States. Declining business turnover is potentially problematic, as it may signal a drop in innovation and productivity growth as well as a lower share of economic activity at new businesses. As a result, the economic fortunes of metropolitan areas are likely to be intertwined with the rate of business turnover they experience. {{p}} As the U.S. economy continues to transition from producing goods to providing services, changes in business turnover are ...
Journal Article
Uneven Innovation in the U.S.
The San Jose and San Francisco areas don’t make the U.S. top 10 in terms of population, and they each contain merely 1% of the national workforce. But jointly they produce about 20% of all innovation output.
Journal Article
Diversification and Specialization Across Urban Areas
Los Angeles is famous for the entertainment industry, San Jose for technology companies, and New York for the financial firms surrounding Wall Street. While each of these urban areas has a unique identity related to a particular sector of the economy, each is also, in fact, very diverse in its industrial composition. Urban areas differ in the extent to which they have a diverse set of industries or, conversely, the degree to which they are very specialized in a particular industry. Richmond Fed analysis supports previous research findings on the extent to which diversification or ...
Journal Article
The Richmond Fed and Urban Economics
Briefing
A Look at the Impact of the Work-From-Home Revolution
In this article, I survey the state of remote work in the American economy and investigate the implications for workers, businesses and local economies. Comprehensive real-time survey data agree: Work from home is here to stay. The ability to offer remote or hybrid arrangements has become an important tool for employers to attract and retain talent, as workers value the flexibility that working from home affords them. Meanwhile, what has been a positive development to many workers poses significant challenges for urban cores that no longer benefit from the daily influx of commuters and their ...
Journal Article
Overlooked Suburbs: The Changing Metropolitan Geography of Poverty in the Western United States
This report examines trends between 1990 and 2014—18 in the location of populations experiencing poverty, which we define as those with incomes below the federal poverty line, within metropolitan regions in the United States, with a particular focus on the western United States.We explore how growing suburban poverty is distributed across jurisdictional boundaries that shape governance outcomes, including incorporated and unincorporated suburbs. The size of a suburb and its incorporation status affect its position within local-regional political structures, and smaller suburbs may be ...