C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - S E V E N Measuring and Analyzing Urban Employment Fluctuations INTRODUCTION CITIES ARE NOT JUST LITTLE VERSIONS OF THE NATION National economies experience cyclical behavior; they rise and fall, have booms and recessions. From this, we can make the obvious inference that the geographical components of a national economy | A Companion to Urban Economics Edited by Richard J. Arnott Daniel P. McMillen Copyright 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Measuring and Analyzing Urban Employment Fluctuations N. Edward Coulson Introduction Cities are not just little versions of the nation National economies experience cyclical behavior they rise and fall have booms and recessions. From this we can make the obvious inference that the geographical components of a national economy - regions states and cities - must also experience cyclical or other types of temporal variation. After all the nation is the sum of its parts and if the sum rises and falls it logically follows that the parts must do so as well. However it does not follow that the parts must rise and fall in concert. Regions states and metropolitan areas may rise and fall at different times with different frequencies with different intensities and for different reasons. Therefore analysis of a nation s geographical subeconomies is of interest since these regions states and cities do not simply follow national trends each place has its own unique characteristics that manifest themselves in behavior that differs both from that of the nation as a whole and from that of other areas. In keeping with the theme of this volume I concentrate on city - technically metropolitan statistical area MSA - employment although much of the discussion below could apply to larger or smaller geographical entities and to other measures of city growth such as total earnings. And as witness to both the similarities and differences in cities growth and change over time examine Figure which Los Angeles Detroit San Jose Figure The time series behavior of total employment thousands in San Jose Los Angeles and Detroit. merely plots the time series of total MSA employment for three different US cities Los Angeles California Detroit Michigan and San Jose California over the period from 1956 to 2002 like all of the data used in this .
