Economists, beginning with Alfred Marshall, have studied the significance of cities in the production and exploitation of information externalities that, today, we call knowledge spillovers. This paper presents robust evidence of those effects. We show that patent intensity—the per capita...

This paper examines the role local labor markets play in the production of innovations. The authors appeal to a labor market matching model (á la Berliant, Reed, and Wang 2004) to argue that in dense urban areas, workers are more selective in their matches and are therefore more productive....

In this paper, the authors document a pronounced trend toward deconcentration of metropolitan employment during the postwar period in the United States. The employment share of initially more dense metro areas declined and those of initially less dense metro areas rose. Motivated by this...

In this paper, the authors document that the disparity in employment densities across U.S. metropolitan areas has lessened substantially over the postwar period. To account for this deconcentration of metropolitan employment, the authors develop a system-of-cities model in which an increase in...

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...

This paper examines the cyclical dynamics of per capita personal income for the major U.S. regions during the 1953:3-95:2 period. The analysis reveals considerable differences in the volatility of regional cycles. Controlling for differences in volatility, the authors find a great deal of...