Intrametropolitan Locational Patterns of People and Jobs (Working Paper)

Which Government Interventions Make a Difference

Author(s): Bollinger, Christopher R. and Keith R. Ihlanfeldt
Publication Date: November 2000

44 pages; Inventory ID WP00CB1; English


Intrametropolitan Locational Patterns of People and Jobs	944 KB

Abstract

State and local governments heavily intervene into urban land markets. There is growing interest in how these interventions affect the locations of people and jobs, because of concerns over urban sprawl and spatial mismatch between the locations of low-skilled workers and low-skilled jobs. Unfortunately, little evidence exists on these effects. This paper presents evidence on how a wide range of government interventions, as well as crime, alter the spatial distributions of population and employment within a metropolitan area. A unique panel database for census tracts within the Atlanta Region is used to estimate a dynamic adjustment model with fixed effects. Two variables are distinguished by their robust effects across the ten population and employment groups included in our data: whether there exists a limited access, divided highway in the tract and the total crime rate for the jurisdiction in which the tract is located.