Foster, and participants at the NBER/CRIW conference on Producer Dynamics in April 2005 and at an AEA/SBA session in January 2005. We also would like to thank Paul Hanczaryk for helping us understand the Census Bureau's nonemployer data. This work has undergone a more limited review than official Census Bureau publications. The views, findings, and opinions expressed in this work are those of the authors and not the U.S. Census Bureau. All results have been reviewed to ensure confidentiality.
The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to gain a fuller understanding of factors that foster community cohesion and contribute to the residents' social and economic well‐being; and, second, to move beyond previous research that used larger spatial units such as states, counties, or aggregates of counties and to focus instead on American small towns (population 2,500–20,000). The data on small towns are drawn from public‐use files and from confidential microdata from various economic censuses. From these sources we construct measures of locally oriented firms, self‐employment, business establishments that serve as gathering places, and associations. The local capitalism and civic engagement variables generally perform as hypothesized; in some cases they are related quite strongly to civic welfare outcomes such as income levels, poverty rates, and nonmigration rates. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of working with place‐level data and suggest some strategies for subsequent work on small towns and other incorporated places.
In the 1990s, studies have documented widespread growth of immigrants in U.S. communities not known as common destinations in the past. This trend has fueled population growth in some nonmetropolitan areas and offset population decline in other areas. In this paper, we examine the implications of recent foreign born in-migration for rural America. Our focus is on a collection of 59 nonmetropolitan counties where growth in foreign born stock offset declines in U.S. native population and resulted in increased local population by 2000. To understand these nonmetropolitan offset counties, we use confidential Census Bureau data that offer us the detailed geography and larger sample size needed to closely examine spatial shifts in the foreign born population, especially those recently arrived. Our findings illustrate dramatic compositional shifts in the populations of these areas, and suggest new demographic complexity in nonmetropolitan areas in the 21 st century.There is a new and growing scholarly literature that examines immigrants in nonmetropolitan areas of the United States. From early case studies of the foreign born in meatpacking towns (Gouveia and Stull 1997;Stull, Broadway, and Erickson 1992;Stull, Broadway, and Griffith 1995) to recent studies that examine the incorporation of particular groups, such as Mexicans, in new localities (Zú ñ iga and Hernández-Leó n 2005), scholars now recognize that immigrant populations are changing the landscape of rural America. Studies document shifts in foreign born population away from the
The Hoover index, calculated across counties and larger spatial units, is again declining—signalling a renewal of population deconcentration in the United States. After increasing for several decades, the index declined in the 1970s when nonmetropolitan population growth surged past metropolitan-area growth, but the index rose in the 1980s as metropolitan population growth recovered and surpassed nonmetropolitan growth. We update these trends, introducing careful controls for changes in metropolitan-area boundaries, and we incorporate a ‘functional urban region’ approach. Although the nonmetropolitan population growth rate is still below the metropolitan rate, we conclude that in the 1990s some features of the ‘turnaround’ of the 1970s have returned.
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