This paper is dedicated to the contributions of Sir Richard Stone, Michael Bacharach, and Philip Israilevich. It starts out with a brief history of biproportional techniques and related matrix balancing algorithms. We then discuss the RAS algorithm developed by Sir Richard Stone and others. We...

The main difficulty in comparing the cost-of-living among metropolitan areas is that, at this level, prices of most goods and services are not available. Even when the prices are available, constructing aggregate prices for groups of goods and services comparable across areas, is a difficult...

In this paper I investigate from a strict efficiency perspective whether or not New York City’s suburbs should be helping the city in its economic development efforts. By analyzing metropolitan New York City, I am able to take advantage of the area’s spatial size and the ready...

In this paper we develop an index for comparing the cost of doing business across several metropolitan areas in the U.S. Such indices can be used as leading indicators of metropolitan economic growth. To create the index, we first identify factors that influence the change in business activity...

In this paper we examine the link between additions to highway infrastructure and development of a market area. We do so by first relating highway travel speeds to added highway-mileage and then relating travel speed to the size of the market area. This approach bypasses issues in the public...