Richard Florida

Economic development today is trapped in a costly, wasteful, and largely ineffective incentive game, even as the bidding wars between cities and states continue to escalate. States and localities now spend between $45 and $90 billion a year on economic development incentives, depending on the estimate, with individual deals routinely costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per job created. The absurdity of the Amazon HQ2 contest and other megadeals makes the paradox plain: even when local leaders know incentives don’t work, they feel they cannot walk away. There is a way out of this trap, but it requires more than better research. It requires a compact between states, cities, professional economic developers, and researchers built around two goals: ending the incentive competition that has defined the field for 40 years and redirecting those resources into place-based investments in people, innovation, and communities that actually work.

Globalization is often seen as having a homogenizing effect, reducing pronounced local cultural differences. The kinds of housing people live in are one of the most pronounced expressions of local culture. Our research utilizes a unique dataset of more than 640,000 Airbnb images and employs a visual AI framework to exam- ine the differences and similarities in people’s living spaces across 80 cities. We show that geographic proximity and socio-economic connectivity—measured by air traffic data—are significantly correlated with the visual features of indoor spaces (R = 0.19 to 0.32), with cities closer to each other or having high pas- senger traffic between them also exhibiting high visual similarity. Our results challenge the prevailing notion that cultural homogenization may be overdrawn. Despite the homogenizing influence of globalization, distinctive local styles per- sist in domestic living arrangements. This research highlights the resilience of local identities and cultural distinctions in the face of global pressures.

Power couples, defined as pairs of highly educated partners, tend to cluster in cities to take advantage of more developed labor markets, better jobs, and higher wages. This research examines to what extent being a partner in a power couple brings additional wage income benefits. We examine what the effects of power couple partnering is on wage income. Furthermore, we examine how the results are affected by gender and place of residence. To determine this, the research uses detailed Swedish micro data on power couples 23–39 years of age over the period 2007–2016. Our analysis finds positive and significant results from being in a power couple on wage income after controlling for individual, workplace, and geographical characteristics. This is the case for both men and women in power couple households without children, but for women only when children are present. For power couples in denser urban areas, we find a positive effect for men in power couples with or without children. We suggest this effect is due to a more equal “balance of power” between partners in highly educated power couples located in bigger cities, where norms and values may favor a relatively greater sharing of household duties between men and women, and where men face a different competitive situation in the labor market.

This research investigates the economic geography of urban technology, or ‘urban tech’, start-up enterprises. Comprised of ride-hailing, co-living, co-working, smart cities and other urban-oriented activities, urban tech is a suite of innovations that enable and are premised upon growing urbanization. We investigate where urban tech comes from by analysing Pitchbook, a database of venture capital deals, to chart the evolution and geography of urban tech start-up firms. We show urban tech firms to be highly clustered in two kinds of places: specialized tech hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area and large cities such as New York, London and Beijing. Furthermore, we find that urban tech geography is associated with two classes of factors: the scale of existing tech activity, and the size and extent of metro areas. Together these findings suggest that the geography of urban tech is shaped by the innovative capabilities of urban areas and, to a lesser extent, by urbanization itself. Urban tech investment is less common in areas associated with ‘Industry 4.0’ industrial policy.

The decline in fertility across advanced nations is a well‐known fact. Becker famously argued that declining rates of childbirth were the by‐product of higher levels of economic development and human capital. Recently, it has been suggested that two additional factors might lead to declining rates of childbirth—the higher housing costs of expensive cities and the change in the nature of work and employment from more regular and secure full‐time work to less secure arrangements, like self‐employment. Our research examines the effect of these two classes of factors—housing costs and self‐employment—on fertility, in regard to both the rate of childbirth and the delay in the age at which people have children. We use detailed panel data covering all Swedish individuals in their prime childbearing years (20–45) for the 10‐year period 2007–2016. Our findings indicate that the likelihood of having a child is affected negatively by increased housing costs and positively by self‐employment. Both result in a delay in the parental age at which children are born. Of the two, self‐employment has a relatively large effect.

The ongoing COVID‐19 crisis has put the relationship between spatial structure and disease exposure into relief. Here, we propose that mega regions – clusters of metropolitan regions like the Acela Corridor in the United States are more exposed to diseases earlier in pandemics. We review standard accounts for the benefits and costs of locating in such regions before arguing that pandemic risk is higher there on average. We test this mega region exposure theory with a study of the US urban system. Our results indicate that American mega regions have born the early brunt of the disease, and that three mega regions are hotspots. From this standpoint, the extent more than the intensity of New York's urbanization may be implicated in its COVID‐19 experience. We conclude that early pandemic risk is a hitherto unrecognised diseconomy operating in mega regions.

This paper develops a theory of large corporate headquarters’ location in post-industrial capitalism. It posits that human capital has become the primary factor in the location decisions of large corporate headquarters. It argues that such operations will locate in skilled cities that are also larger and globally connected. These hypotheses are tested using data from the Fortune 500 between 1955 and 2017. Count models are estimated to test the relative importance of human capital, population size and airport connectivity, alongside taxation and other factors identified in the relevant literature. The findings are consistent with the hypotheses.