Industry-Specific Employment Multipliers in U.S. Nonmetropolitan Economies

抄録

A disaggregate or multi-sector economic base model is estimated for the nonmetropolitan U.S. in the years 1980, 1990, and 2000. Two very different employment-based data sets are analyzed. One data set includes 196 towns located in four Southwestern states; the other includes 577 micropolitan counties distributed across the entire nation. A disaggregate economic base model, which generates industry-specific multipliers, is shown to be a substantial improvement over the better known aggregate model, which generates a single multiplier. These industry-specific multipliers, which varied quite a lot across the two data sets, exhibited a surprising amount of stability during the 20-year study period. However, the employment multipliers of the somewhat smaller Southwestern towns experienced more longitudinal volatility than those of their larger micropolitan counterparts. Four functional types of sub-metropolitan economies (having different specializations) were identified in both data sets: diversified, industrial, service, and trade. With the diversified group adopted as a benchmark, the other three types of nonmetropolitan economies are shown to have had somewhat different patterns of employment multipliers in the year 2000.

JEL Classification: R11, R12, R15