How Centralized is U.S. Metropolitan Employment?

Jason Brown, Maeve Maloney, Jordan Rappaport and Aaron Smalter Hall ()

No RWP 17-16, Research Working Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City

Abstract: Centralized employment remains a benchmark stylization of metropolitan land use.To address its empirical relevance, we delineate \"central employment zones\" (CEZs)- central business districts together with nearby concentrated employment|for 183 metropolitan areas in 2000. To do so, we first subjectively classify which census tracts in a training sample of metros belong to their metro's CEZ and then use a learning algorithm to construct a function that predicts our judgment. {{p}} Applying this prediction function to the full cross section of metros estimates the probability we would judge each census tract as belonging to its metro's CEZ. Using a high probability threshold for tract inclusion conservatively delineates a predicted CEZ for each metro. On average, the conservatively predicted CEZs account for only 12 percent of metropolitan employment in 2000. But the distribution of shares is positively skewed, with the conservatively predicted CEZs accounting for at least 20 percent of employment in 29 metros. Employment centralization is considerably higher for agglomerative occupations|those that arguably bene t most from face-to-face contact. The conservatively predicted CEZs account for at least 33 percent of agglomerative employment in 24 metros and at least 50 percent of legal employment in 79 metros.

Keywords: central business districts; Employment density; Metropolitan land use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C45 R12 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2017-11-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.kansascityfed.org/documents/504/pdf-Ho ... Employment%3F%20.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:fip:fedkrw:rwp17-16

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Working Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Zach Kastens ().