Sprouting Cities: How Rural America Industrialized

Fabian Eckert, John Juneau and Michael Peters

University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC San Diego

Abstract: We study the joint process of urbanization and industrialization in the US economy between 1880 and 1940. We show that only a small share of aggregate industrialization is accounted for by the relocation of workers from remote rural areas to industrial hubs like Chicago or New York City. Instead, most sectoral shifts occurred within rural counties, dramatically transforming their sectoral structure. Most within-county industrialization occurred through the emergence of new “factory” cities with notably higher manufacturing shares rather than the expansion of incumbent cities. In contrast, today's shift toward services seems to benefit large incumbent cities the most.

Keywords: Rural Health; Industry; Innovation and Infrastructure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/16n3j5rh.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Sprouting Cities: How Rural America Industrialized (2023)
Working Paper: Sprouting Cities: How Rural America Industrialized (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:ucsdec:qt16n3j5rh

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC San Diego Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().