Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'urbanization'
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Authors
Todd Gardner - 3
Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 14
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Working PaperFinding Suburbia in the Census
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-40
This study introduces a methodology that goes beyond the urban/rural dichotomy to classify areas into detailed settlement types: urban cores, suburbs, exurbs, outlying towns, and rural areas. Utilizing a database that provides housing unit estimates for census tracts as defined in 2010 for all decennial census years from 1940 to 2020, this research enables a longitudinal analysis of urban spatial expansion. By maintaining consistent geography across time, the methodology described in this paper emphasizes the era of development, as well as proximity to large urban centers. This broadly applicable methodology provides a framework for comparing the evolution of urban landscapes over a significant historical period, revealing trends in the transformation of territory from rural to urban, as well as associated suburbanization and exurban growth.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperApplying Current Core Based Statistical Area Standards to Historical Census Data, 1940-2020
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-10
In the middle of the twentieth century, the Bureau of the Budget, in conjunction with the Census Bureau and other federal statistical agencies, introduced a widely used unit of statistical geography, the county-based Standard Metropolitan Area. Metropolitan definitions since then have been generally regarded as comparable, but methodological changes have resulted in comparability issues, particularly among the largest and most complex metro areas. With the 2000 census came an effort to simplify the rules for defining metro areas. This study attempts to gather all available historical geographic and commuting data to apply the current rules for defining metro areas to create comparable statistical geography covering the period from 1940 to 2020. The changes that accompanied the 2000 census also brought a new category, "Micropolitan Statistical Areas," which established a metro hierarchy. This research expands on this approach, using a more elaborate hierarchy based on the size of urban cores. The areas as delineated in this paper provide a consistent set of statistical geography that can be used in a wide variety of applications.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFood Security Status Across the Rural-Urban Continuum Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-01
Background: Food security, defined as consistent access to sufficient food to support an active life, is a crucial social determinant of health. A key dimension affecting food security is position along the rural-urban continuum, as there are important socio-economic and environmental differences between communities related to urbanicity or rurality that impact food access. The COVID-19 pandemic created social and economic shocks that altered financial and food security, which may have had differential effects by rurality and urbanicity. However, there has been limited research on how food security differs across the shades of the rural-urban community spectrum, as most often researchers have characterized communities as either urban or rural. Methods: In this study, which linked restricted use Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement data to census-tract level United States Department of Agriculture Rural-Urban Commuting Area codes, we estimated the prevalence of household food security across temporal (2015-2019 versus 2020-2021) and socio-spatial (urban, large rural city/town, small rural town, or isolated rural town/area) dimensions in order to characterize variations before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by urbanicity/rurality. We report prevalences as point estimates with 95% confidence intervals. Results: The prevalence of food security was 87.7% (87.5-88.0%) in 2015-2019 and 88.8% (88.4-89.3%) in 2020-2021 for urban areas, 85.5% (84.7-86.2%) in 2015-2019 and 87.1% (85.7-88.3%) in 2020-2021 for large rural towns/cities, 82.8% (81.5-84.1%) in 2015-2019 and 87.3% (85.7-89.2%) in 2020-2021 for small rural towns, and 87.6% (86.3-88.8%) in 2015-2019 and 90.9% (88.7-92.7%) in 2020-2021 for isolated rural towns/areas. Conclusion: These findings show that rural communities experiences of food security vary and aggregating households in these environments may mask areas of concern and concentrated need.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperChanges in Metropolitan Area Definition, 1910-2010
February 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-04
The Census Bureau was established as a permanent agency in 1902, as industrialization and urbanization were bringing about rapid changes in American society. The years following the establishment of a permanent Census Bureau saw the first attempts at devising statistical geography for tabulating statistics for large cities and their environs. These efforts faced several challenges owing to the variation in settlement patterns, political organization, and rates of growth across the United States. The 1910 census proved to be a watershed, as the Census Bureau offered a definition of urban places, established the first census tract boundaries for tabulating data within cities, and introduced the first standardized metropolitan area definition. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Census Bureau in association with other statistical agencies had established a flexible standard metropolitan definition and a more consistent means of tabulating urban data. Since 1950, the rules for determining the cores and extent of metropolitan areas have been largely regarded as comparable. In the decades that followed, however, a number of rule changes were put into place that accounted for metropolitan complexity in differing ways, and these have been the cause of some confusion. Changes put into effect with the 2000 census represent a consensus of sorts for how to handle these issues.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperBright Minds, Big Rent: Gentrification and the Rising Returns to Skill
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-36R
In 1980, Census data indicate, housing prices in large US cities rose with distance from the city center. By 2010, the relationship had reversed. We propose that this development can be traced to high-income households working longer hours. With little non-market time, proximity to work takes on added salience, leading high-income households to forgo suburban amenities and extending the gentrification trend beyond its 1970s niche status. In a tract-level data set covering the 27 largest US cities, years 1980-2010, we find support for our hypothesis. Using a Bartik-type demand shifter for skilled labor we find that full-time skilled workers favor centrality and the rising share in the population can account for the observed price changes in favor of the city center.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Spatial Extent of Agglomeration Economies: Evidence from Three U.S. Manufacturing Industries
January 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-01
The spatial extent of localized agglomeration economies constitutes one of the central current questions in regional science. It is crucial for understanding firm location decisions and for assessing the influence of proximity in shaping spatial patterns of economic activity, yet clear-cut answers are difficult to come by. Theoretical work often fails to define or specify the spatial dimension of agglomeration phenomena. Existing empirical evidence is far from consistent. Most sources of data on economic performance do not supply micro-level information containing usable geographic locations. This paper provides evidence of the distances across which distinct sources of agglomeration economies generate benefits for plants belonging to three manufacturing industries in the United States. Confidential data from the Longitudinal Research Database of the United States Census Bureau are used to estimate cross-sectional production function systems at the establishment level for three contrasting industries in three different years. Along with relevant establishment, industry, and regional characteristics, the production functions include variables that indicate the local availability of potential labor and supply pools and knowledge spillovers. Information on individual plant locations at the county scale permits spatial differentiation of the agglomeration variables within geographic regions. Multiple distance decay profiles are investigated in order to explore how modifying the operationalization of proximity affects indicated patterns of agglomeration externalities and interfirm interactions. The results imply that industry characteristics are at least as important as the type of externality mechanism in determining the spatial pattern of agglomeration benefits. The research methods borrow from earlier work by the author that examines the relationships between regional industrial structure and manufacturing production.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperMigration Decisions in Arctic Alaska: Empirical Evidence of the Stepping Stones Hypothesis
December 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-41
This paper explores hypotheses of hierarchical migration using data from the Alaskan Arctic. We focus on migration of I'upiat people, who are indigenous to the region, and explore the role of income, harvests of subsistence resources, and other place characteristics in migration decisions. To test related hypotheses we use confidential micro-data from the US Census Bureau's 2000 Decennial Census of Population and Income. Using predicted earnings and subsistence along with place invariant characteristics we generate migration probabilities using a mixed multinomial and conditional logit model. Our results support stepwise migration patterns, both up and down an urban and rural hierarchy. At the same time, we also identify differences between men and women, and we find mixed effects of place amenities and predicted earnings.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAccess to Workers or Employers? An Intra-Urban Analysis of Plant Location Decisions
September 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-21R
This analysis attributes economies of agglomeration to either labor market pooling or employer-based productivity spillovers by distinguishing the effect of access to workers, measured by place-of-residence, from the effect of access to employers. New establishment location choices serve as a measure of productivity advantages, while census tract level data on access to same-industry employment, other-industry employment, and specialized workers, as well as metropolitan area fixed effects, measure sources of agglomeration and other locational characteristics. The four industries included are selected so that each relies on a workforce with a specialized occupation that is identifiable by place-of-residence, and that productivity and cost advantages are the primary drivers of location choice. The results show that both access to specialized workers and access to same-industry employers contribute to economies of agglomeration at an intra-urban spatial scale, and that the magnitude of the worker effect is large relative to employer-based productivity spillovers.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperLocal Industrial Conditions and Entrepreneurship: How Much of the Spatial Distribution Can We Explain?
October 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-37
Why are some places more entrepreneurial than others? We use Census Bureau data to study local determinants of manufacturing startups across cities and industries. Demo- graphics have limited explanatory power. Overall levels of local customers and suppliers are only modestly important, but new entrants seem particularly drawn to areas with many smaller suppliers, as suggested by Chinitz (1961). Abundant workers in relevant occupations also strongly predict entry. These forces plus city and industry fixed effects explain between sixty and eighty percent of manufacturing entry. We use spatial distributions of natural cost advantages to address partially endogeneity concerns.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSmart Cafe Cities: Testing Human Capital Externalities in the Boston Metropolitan Area
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-24
Existing studies have explored either only one or two of the mechanisms that human capital externalities percolate at only macrogeographic levels. This paper uses the 1990 Massachusetts Census data and tests four mechanisms at the microgeographic levels in the Boston metropolitan area labor market. We propose that individual workers can learn from their occupational and industrial peers in the same local labor market through four channels: depth of human capital stock, Marshallian labor market externalities, Jacobs labor market externalities, and thickness of the local labor market. We find that all types of human capital externalities are significant across Census blocks. Different types of externalities attenuate at different speeds over distances. For example, the effect of human capital depth decays rapidly beyond three miles away from block centroid. We conclude that knowledge spillovers are very localized within microgeographic scope in cities that we call Smart Caf' Cities.View Full Paper PDF
