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Cross-sectional growth in US cities from 1990 to 2000

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Abstract

This paper analyses the growth of American cities, understood as the growth of the population or of the per capita income, from 1990 to 2000. This empirical analysis uses data from all the cities (incorporated places) with more than 25,000 inhabitants in the year 2000 (1,152 cities). The results show that while common convergence behaviour is observed in both population and per capita income growth, there are differences in the evolution of the distributions: the population distribution remains almost unchanged, while the per capita income distribution makes a great movement to the right. We use two different methodologies to test cross-sectional convergence across cities: linear growth models (allowing for spatial spillovers between locations) and spatial quantile regressions. We find evidence of significant spatial effects and nonlinear behaviour.

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Notes

  1. A good commentary on the relationship between cities and national economic growth can be found in Polèse (2005).

  2. See Le Gallo et al. (2003) for a similar exercise of spatial econometric analysis of convergence across European regions.

  3. The US Census Bureau offers information on a large number of variables for different geographical levels, available on its website: www.census.gov.

  4. The land area data also come from the US Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/places.html and http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/places2k.html.

  5. These data are the 30-year average values computed from the data recorded during the period 1971–2000. Source: U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), Climatography of the United States, Number 81 (http://cdo.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/climatenormals/climatenormals.pl).

  6. We also introduce state-level dummies into some of the preliminary estimations, but most of them are not significant and the results are qualitatively the same.

  7. Everything seems to indicate that this behaviour has persisted for decades. Figure 2 of Young et al. (2008), corresponding to the evolution of the distribution of US counties’ log per capita incomes from 1970 to 1998, presents a very similar effect to that observed in our estimated kernel of city per capita income distribution from 1989 to 1999.

  8. Although there is a great deal of variability in the results reported in the literature, see the meta-analysis by Melo et al. (2009).

  9. Fingleton and López-Bazo (2006) survey the literature on empirical growth models with spatial effects and conclude that most contributions focus their attention on the spatial lag and the spatial error models, neglecting the spatial cross-regressive specification.

  10. Spatial coordinates (longitude and latitude in decimal degrees) data for the incorporated places are obtained from the US Census Bureau Gazetteer.

  11. The spatial matrix was constructed using the SPATWMAT Stata command. The spatial regressions are estimated with the SPATDIAG and the SPATREG commands. All these tools for spatial data analysis using Stata were developed by Maurizio Pisati.

  12. The inclusion of the spatial lag in these OLS regressions can cause an endogeneity issue. We will deal with this potential problem in the next section.

  13. This is omitted because of data scarcity, although part of this variable could be captured by the city land area growth, which has already been included.

  14. The spatial quantile regressions are estimated using the McSpatial R package developed by Daniel McMillen.

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Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (ECO2013-45969-P and ECO2013-41310-R projects), the DGA (ADETRE research group), and FEDER. An earlier version of this paper was previously circulated under the title “What makes cities bigger and richer? New evidence from 1990–2000 in the US.”

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  1. Departamento de Análisis Económico, Facultad de Economía y Empresa, Institut d’Economia de Barcelona (IEB), Universidad de Zaragoza, Gran Via 2, 50005, Zaragoza, Spain

    Rafael González-Val

  2. Facultat d’Economia i Empresa, Institut d’Economia de Barcelona (IEB), Universitat de Barcelona, c/Tinent Coronel Valenzuela, 1-11, 08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Rafael González-Val

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Correspondence to Rafael González-Val.

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González-Val, R. Cross-sectional growth in US cities from 1990 to 2000. J Geogr Syst 17, 83–106 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10109-014-0204-0

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