Editors' Summary

Abstract

BrookingsWharton Papers on Urban Affairs presents new research on urban economics to a broad audience of interested policy analysts and researchers. The papers and comments contained in this volume, the tenth in the series, were presented at a conference on November 13–14, 2008, at the Brookings Institution. The papers examine a range of issues that are relevant to urban economics, including the effects of job location in an urban area on residential choice patterns, racial bias in mortgage lending, and the effects of urban characteristics on the development of new patents. The volume also contains three papers on urban developments outside of the United States. The topics treated include urban sprawl in Europe, ruraltourban migration patterns in Brazil, and locational patterns of establishments across Japanese cities. After World War II, a growing percentage of Americans moved to the nation’s suburbs, and a shrinking percentage chose to live in central cities. This shift in residential patterns occurred at the same time as a shift in the location of jobs. Compared with job locations in the early postwar period, a smaller share of U.S. employment is now concentrated in central cities and a bigger share is located in the suburbs. For regional planners and urban economists, this raises an important question: Have residents of metropolitan areas flocked to the suburbs because that is where the jobs are? Or have employers followed urban migrants out into the suburbs? In their paper “Job Decentralization and Residential Location,” Leah Platt Boustan and Robert A. Margo offer a partial answer to this question using information on the residential choices of state government employees who hold jobs inside and outside of state capitals. The location of state capitals was chosen many decades ago, and no state has chosen to relocate its capital since the early twentieth century. State government employment in capital cities tends to be concentrated near the historical heart of cities, usually in or near the central business district. The persistence of state employment patterns in state capitals