Abstract
Empirical studies investigating urban sprawl and the determinants of city size with the Mills-Muth framework have struggled to find a reliable and ubiquitous proxy for the theoretical commuting costs variable. This study is the first to apply the Davidson-McKinnon non-nested specification test to address the long-standing issue in the literature of determining the best proxy measure for commuting costs. We employ this specification test to evaluate the three most widely available commuting costs measures from the literature: vehicle availability, public transit usage, and commuting speed. For a sample of all urbanized areas in 2000 and 2010, our results provide a degree of resolution. While we find for a pooled sample of all urbanized areas that commuting speed is the preferred proxy, subsample analysis reveals the prior result may be driven by larger urbanized areas spanning more than one county; commuting speed dominates the other proxies for these larger cities. Conversely, the sizes of single-county urbanized areas are explained by vehicle availability and transit usage, though neither of those proxy measures emerge as dominant, suggesting some unspecified measure may be better for these smaller cities.
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Data Availability
The data for this study is available at https://doi.org/10.17632/vczrf7g8sf.1
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SAS and Stata code available upon request.
Notes
See, for example, Paulsen (2012), whose dissatisfaction with available commuting costs proxies prompts omission from the empirical models in that study.
The Census of Agriculture is not conducted in the same years as the Census of Population. We use 2002 and 2012 from the former, since they are the closest years to Census years 2000 and 2010, respectively.
Tract and UA centroid coordinates are from the Census Bureau Gazetteer files.
These results are available from the authors upon request.
Although the focus of this study in on commuting cost variables, we note in passing the negative and significant Income coefficient, which is a puzzling result that disagrees with the theory. Spivey (2008) and DiBartolomeo and Turnbull (forthcoming) also report a significantly negative income effect in several model specifications.
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DiBartolomeo, J.A., Turnbull, G.K. Commuting Costs and Urban Sprawl: Which Proxy Measures Up?. J Real Estate Finan Econ 67, 375–387 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11146-021-09863-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11146-021-09863-z