The Impact of the Spatial Population Distribution on Economic Growth: Evidence from the United States

Constantin Bürgi and Nisan Gorgulu

No 10008, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We look at a part of the spatial angle of economic growth. We introduce a new measure Spatial Population Concentration (SPC) that captures the weighted average population surrounding every person within a geographic area. The weights are a function of the distance between the person in question and everyone else. One special case of the SPC would be to measure how many people live on average within a given radius of every person within a geographic area. We then calculate the SPC measure at the US county level for various radii and identify that the measure has the strongest relationship with subsequent economic growth for a 25km radius. Interacting SPC with various infrastructure measures increases the radius to 50km. This suggests that regional policies which affect density as infrastructure projects should target the 25-50km distance range to maximize the growth impact.

Keywords: spatial population concentration; endogeneous growth; spillover; the United States (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O47 O51 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-gro and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10008.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable

Related works:
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:ces:ceswps:_10008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().