Do Jobs Still Attract People? Spatial and Temporal Changes in Job-Population Relationship in US Metropolitan Areas 1970-2017

Abstract

Traditional perspectives on projecting metropolitan scale population growth rely on the expectation that people follow jobs. Changes in the nature and duration of employment have led to speculation that this relationship is weakening. Rapid population growth in some metro areas with high unemployment following the recession of 2008 lends support to suggestions that a paradigm shift has occurred in the process of urban growth. We test the equilibrium expectation that employment to population ratios will remain constant over both space and time. We use data on metropolitan area working-age population and employment from 1970 to 2017 to show that (1) there are significant spatial variations in employment to population ratios; (2) many metro areas consistently outperform and under-perform U.S. averages while few behave stochastically – indicating that the expectation of equilibrium may be misplaced. We conclude that persistent errors in the employment to population relationship indicate that the narrative associated with a metropolitan economy may influence population growth rates more than the actual availability of employment. Our data are consistent in showing that employment to population ratios consistently fail to predict population growth over 5- and 10-year periods. These findings have implications for those planning or projecting urban growth.