The Topography of Metropolitan Employment: Identify Centers of Employment in a Polycentric Urban Area

Christian L. Redfearn

No 8588, Working Paper from USC Lusk Center for Real Estate

Abstract: Increasingly, U.S. metropolitan areas are polycentric. While this is well recognized, there is lit-tle consensus as to the appropriate method for identifying centers of employment and their extent.Discussions of sprawl and decentralization, agglomeration and productivity, and the impacts oftransportation or land-use regulation on urban structure depend crucially on the spatial account-ing of employment within a metropolitan area. Existing methods for subcenter identi¯cation su®erfrom strong assumptions about parametric form, misspeci¯cation, or reliance on local knowledge tocalibrate model parameters. Using data from the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, this paperintroduces a nonparametric method for identifying subcenters { both their centroids and bound-aries. This method is benchmarked against representative alternatives for subcenter identi¯cation.The importance of the di®erence in approaches is made clear by comparing their measured con-centration of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Results indicate that this, more °exible,nonparametric approach yields both greater accuracy in de¯ning subcenter boundaries and betterresolution identifying a wide range of subcenters. These attributes should better inform researchthat employs density as an independent or dependent variable.

Keywords: Urban Economics; spatial econometrics; subcenters (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://lusk.usc.edu/sites/default/files/working_papers/wp_2005-1003.pdf (application/pdf)

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:luk:wpaper:8588

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from USC Lusk Center for Real Estate Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Steins ().