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"Wolman, Harold"
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Urban and regional policy and its effects
\"Brings policymakers, practitioners, and scholars up to speed on the state of knowledge on urban and regional policy issues. Conceptualizes fresh thinking of different aspects (economic development, education, land use), presenting main themes and implications and identifying gaps to fill for successful formulation and implementation of urban and regional policy\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Policy Transfer as a Form of Prospective Policy Evaluation: Challenges and Recommendations
This article focuses on policy transfer as a form of prospective policy analysis, which we define as policy makers' attempts to assess the effect of a policy or program before it is put in place. Despite a burgeoning literature on cross-national policy transfer, there has been little systematic comparison of cases to identify either common problems or potential strategies in the practice of policy transfer. This article sets forth a rational model of policy transfer and examines, in light of that model, case studies of cross-national policy transfer spanning different policy domains. Taking into account the constraints faced by policy makers, we relax standard rational decision-making criteria and make recommendations for improving the process of policy transfer as a form of prospective policy evaluation.
Journal Article
Understanding the Economic Performance of Metropolitan Areas in the United States
Examining the drivers of metropolitan economic performance, this paper models two dependent variables: change from 1990 to 2000 in gross metropolitan product and MSA employment. It is found that initial-year economic structure (an above average share of manufacturing employment), agglomeration economies, human capital (share of population with bachelor degrees or higher), and presence of state right-to-work laws are positively and significantly related to GMP and employment growth, while the economic age of the area, percentage of Black non-Hispanic residents and average wage at the beginning of the period are negatively and significantly related to both. The regional dummy variables commonly used to explain economic growth, and typically highly significant, are augmented by including climate-related amenity, business environment and economic age. When these three variables are included in the model as independent variables with the regional dummy variables, all three are significant for growth in GMP and the significance of region largely disappears.
Journal Article
Testing the Conventional Wisdom about Land Use and Traffic Congestion: The More We Sprawl, the Less We Move?
The paper explores relationships between seven dimensions of land use in 1990 and subsequent levels of three traffic congestion outcomes in 2000 for a sample of 50 large US urban areas. Multiple regression models are developed to address several methodological concerns, including reverse causation and time-lags. Controlling for prior levels of congestion and changes in an urban area's transport network and relevant demographics, it is found that: density/continuity is positively related to subsequent roadway ADT/lane and delay per capita; housing centrality is positively related to subsequent delay per capita; and housing-job proximity is inversely related to subsequent commute time. Only the last result corresponds to the conventional wisdom that more compact metropolitan land use patterns reduce traffic congestion. These results prove two points: that the choice of congestion measure may substanti vely affect the results; and that multi variate statistical analyses are necessary to control for potentially confounding influences, such as population growth and investment in the transport network.
Journal Article
What is a Central City in the United States? Applying a Statistical Technique for Developing Taxonomies
We test the null hypothesis that municipalities defined as central cities by the US Bureau of the Census in 1990 are homogeneous—a hypothesis we reject. Rather, we find that US central cities consist of 2 distinct subsets of municipalities that are aggregated from 13 cluster groupings. The article has two purposes. The first is methodological. We develop a method that uses cluster analysis to group US central cities; then we employ discriminant analysis to establish the statistical validity of those groups. We also develop techniques to minimise the role of judgement in selecting the appropriate cluster solution. The second purpose of the article is to test the substantive null hypothesis. Our rejection of the homogeneity assumption raises the spectre of specification error in research and public policies that assume homogeneity among central cities.
Journal Article
Does Government Performance Matter? The Effects of Local Government on Urban Outcomes in England
This paper applies an extensive literature that argues that political leadership and local government activity enhance urban performance. Using the State of the Cities Database of 56 Primary Urban Areas in England, it tests for the impact of consolidated governance, political stability, planning performance, average service performance, local government capacity and planning development expenditure on jobs and population growth from 1995 to 2005. The regression analysis finds that the competence of service delivery is weakly associated with full-time jobs growth and that a consolidated governance structure is weakly associated with greater population growth. None of the other tests is statistically significant. Overall, the findings place doubt on the salience of the political determinants of economic performance in English cities for the period in question.
Journal Article
Evaluating the Success of Urban Success Stories
Arresting and reversing the condition of urban distress in America's cities represents one of the most challenging and perplexing problems confronting policy-makers. Indeed, urban distress in American cities has proved to be a stubborn and largely intractable phenomenon during the past two decades. Nevertheless, a number of cities that were experiencing distress at the beginning of the 1980s are now being acclaimed as 'urban success stories' or 'revitalised' cities. We evaluate the performance, between 1980 and 1990, of these supposedly 'revitalised' cities on objective indicators of the economic well-being of their residents and compare their performance to that other cities that were equally distressed in 1980. We conclude that with the exception of Atlanta, Baltimore and Boston, the purportedly 'revitalised' cities performed no better with respect to change in the economic well-being of their residents than did other cities that were equally distressed in 1980—and in many cases performed worse.
Journal Article
Accounting for the Change in Income Disparities between US Central Cities and their Suburbs from 1980 to 1990
In this paper we are concerned with the widely acknowledged policy problem of substantially higher levels of per capita income in suburban areas of US metropolitan areas compared to that of their central cities. We focus on causes of changes in this per capita income gap from 1980 to 1990 (for those metropolitan areas where such a gap existed in 1980) in an effort to determine what factors are associated with narrowing of these disparities. We do so by first describing the relationship between central-city and suburban per capita income across American metropolitan areas in 1980 and 1990. We review the connection between the operation of metropolitan labour markets and changes in suburban-central-city income disparities. We then develop regression models of changes in income disparities for all 111 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with populations of at least 250 000 in 1980 and where suburban per capita income exceeded central-city per capita income in 1980. This is followed by a summary of the results.
Journal Article
Economic Wellbeing and Where We Live: Accounting for Geographical Cost-of-living Differences in the US
Regional cost-of-living differences affect the quality of life that individuals and families experience in different metropolitan areas. Yet, lack of metropolitan cost-of-living indexes has left analysts without the ability to make accurate cost-of-living adjustments to measures of economic wellbeing. This paper evaluates alternative approaches to cost-of-living measurement and then applies the ACCRA cost-of-living index to various US metropolitan area datasets, including median household income, the number of people living in poverty, and family eligibility for the Free and Reduced Price School Lunch and Head Start programmes to illustrate some of the policy impacts of adjusting economic indicators of wellbeing for geographical cost-of-living differentials.
Journal Article