Growth and Convergence across the United States: Evidence from County-Level Data

Matthew Higgins, Daniel Levy () and Andrew Young ()

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2006, vol. 88, issue 4, 671-681

Abstract: We use U.S. county data (3,058 observations) and 41 conditioning variables to study growth and convergence. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) and three-stage least squares with instrumental variables (3SLS-IV), we report on the full sample and metro, nonmetro, and and regional samples: (1) OLS yields convergence rates around 2%; 3SLS yields 6%-8%; (2) convergence rates vary (for example, the Southern rate is 2.5 times the Northeastern rate); (3) federal, state, and local government negatively correlates with growth; (4) the relationship between educational attainment and growth is nonlinear; and (5) the finance, insurance, and real estate industry and the entertainment industry correlate positively with growth, whereas education employment correlates negatively. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (158)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest.88.4.671 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Growth and Convergence across the United States: Evidence from County-Level Data (2006)
Working Paper: Growth and Convergence across the United States: Evidence from County-Level Data (2006)
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:tpr:restat:v:88:y:2006:i:4:p:671-681

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().