Abstract
The population–employment (P–E) relationship in the multicounty region has not been considered enough to document, although numerous future regional policy issues affecting local areas have required producing a technically sound and politically acceptable projection of population or employment with the US metropolitan planning organizations. This study intended to answer two key questions based on the county-level data sets of P–E ratio for Southern California. First, we investigated whether the Southern California region has been or will be experiencing any convergence in the P–E ratio gap among counties in the long-term perspective. Second, we tested to understand whether a vector autoregression (VAR) approach contributes to developing the county-level P–E ratio projection model for the region. Finally, we validated the VAR projections using independent data sets. The quantified information in the present study can help regional and subregional stakeholders encourage and initiate an effective discussion about the future of the region.
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Notes
This study assumes that undocumented immigrant workers are included in the Decennial Census and other public database, because we do not hold reliable database of the undocumented worker information by county. Also, since the undocumented workers are generally low-income people with a limited accessibility to cars in the mega region context, majority of them tend to stay in the same county for residence and work, traveling a shorter distance than the average US workers. We suspect that undocumented immigrant workers would affect no or little significant impact on the P–E ratio.
The two SCAG-level variables cannot be purely exogenous. However, according to Table 2, it is found that the SCAG-level P–E ratio variable was not significant to every county, and the unemployment variable is only significant to Riverside County, indicating they are skeptical to be highly collinear with local variables. More importantly, these variables at the SCAG level contributed to stabilizing and controlling the VAR model selected, falling the local P–E ratios in a consistent range. Because these two variables ensured fitness and efficiency in the model selection, we included the two variables in spite of the weak endogeneity problem.
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Acknowledgments
This research has been funded by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) and the US Department of Transportation (DOT). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views or policy of SCAG or US DOT. The authors wish to acknowledge the support of Professor Stuart Rosenthal and the valuable comments of two anonymous referees.
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Choi, S., Park, C. & Park, J. A spatio-temporal analysis of population and employment growth for Southern California. Ann Reg Sci 52, 19–40 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-013-0572-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-013-0572-2