The U.S. population has been migrating to places with high perceived quality of life. A calibrated general-equilibrium model shows that such migration follows from broad-based technological progress. Rising national wages increase demand for consumption amenities. Under a baseline...

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...

Using a newly constructed data panel on U.S. locality attributes, this paper sketches four sets of empirical facts on economic growth across U.S. counties. A first set of facts focuses on the time series and cross-correlation properties of local economic growth as measured by net migration, per...

U.S. residents, both old and young, have been moving en masse to places with nice weather. Well known is the migration towards places with warm winter weather, which is often attributed to the introduction of air conditioning. But people have also been moving to places with cooler, less-humid...

This article examines forces underlying the housing recovery to determine when sustained construction growth will resume. The analysis suggests that very strong multifamily construction growth is likely to resume by early 2014 and that moderately strong single-family construction growth is...

Metropolitan areas --unions of nearby built-up locations within which people travel on a day-to-day basis among places of residence, employment, and consumption--serve as a fundamental unit of economic analysis. But existing delineations of U.S. metro areas--including metropolitan Core-Based...