Metropolitan suburbanization and central city problems

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the proposition that residential decisions are made with reference to the male head of household's job location, disadvantaging females in the labor market. A sample of approximately 50,000 adults in two-earner households in urban areas distributed across the United States is selected from public use microdata from the 1980 census and used to estimate a simultaneous model to explain commute to work behavior of men and women. The model is estimated separately for households that did and did not change residences in the past year. The impacts of the new residences on the commute times of both male and female workers, holding other variables constant, are compared. We conclude that residential selection does favor males relative to females, although there is evidence that this advantage is eliminated as the ratio of female to male earnings in the same household narrows.

An Empirical Analysis of the Commute to Work Patterns of Males and Females in Two-Earner Households:

This work examines the effects of local public sector tax and spending decisions on the intrametropolitan location of jobs and workers. Municipality-level data for the entire Philadelphia metropoli...

Local Taxes, Public Services, and the Intrametropolitan Location of Firms and Households

The flight to the suburbs of population and employment, 1960-1970.

Adjustment models are used increasingly to analyze population and employment changes in regional economies. However, questions remain about the most appropriate geographic scales and time lags for these models. In this paper we estimate a well-known adjustment model for a recent 25-year period in the USA. Regional population and employment changes (levels and densities) are examined at three scales (states, Bureau of Economic Analysis regions, counties) using various time lags (one to ten years). Two-stage least squares regression estimates, based on Regional Economic Information System data running between 1969 and 1994, are generated and discussed. Analysis is restricted to the core relationships between population and employment; the roles of other exogenous variables, normally included in adjustment models, are not considered. Instead, concern is focused on issues such as stability and directional causality of the interacting population—employment systems. Some brief suggestions regarding future resea...

Marjorie C. L. Fishert

Papers

The spatial allocation of employment and residence within a metropolitan area