Airports have long been a focus of urban planners. Airport cities, one of the three possible means of addressing the need for rapid airport access, are held to have emerged out of the aviation age. Systematic research into their prevalence and nature is lacking. Thus, airport city planning...

This paper examines the employment situation of all counties in the United States. With a new framework designed to structure 3,283 counties into six tiers, I measure the progress of economic development across the rural-urban continuum. Benchmarks of establishments, employment level, and annual...

Development of an improved definition of the characteristics of business growth and change is an important need for the wide audience that is interested in economic development. This study devotes attention to the intersection of two areas of research interest: the development of firms, and the...

Airport area planning founders on the lack of a basis for realistic projections of future employment. Using a commercial establishment database including detailed data on location, activities (sector), establishment type, and employment for the 62 airports with scheduled passenger service in the...

Gibrat's law, the orthogonality of growth to initial levels, is considered a stylized fact of local population growth. But throughout U.S. history, local population growth has significantly deviated from orthogonality. In earlier periods smaller counties strongly converged whereas larger...

This letter compares the distribution of urban population and economic activity in the European Union and the United States. Economic activity, proxied with nighttime lights, is more unevenly distributed than population, especially in Europe. This reflects that more population does not...

We present a theory of spatial development. A continuum of locations in a geographic area choose each period how much to innovate (if at all) in manufacturing and services. Locations can trade subject to transport costs and technology diffuses spatially across locations. The result is an...

This paper examines whether effects of labor demand shocks on housing prices vary across time and space. Using data on 321 US metropolitan statistical areas, we estimate the medium- and long-run effects of increases in metropolitan statistical area-level employment and total labor income on...

We provide empirical evidence of the dynamics of city size distribution for the whole of the twentieth century in U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. We focus our analysis on the new cities that were created during the period of analysis. The main contribution of this paper, therefore, is the...

We measure the effect of coal resource sector dependence on long run income growth using the natural experiment of coal mining in 409 U.S. counties that are selected for homogeneity. Using a panel data set (1970-2010), we find a one standard deviation increase in resource dependence is...