This article introduces ETURAS, a suite of software tools designed to analyze commute patterns using Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data. LEHD offers detailed information on workforce housing patterns, job locations, and transportation connections between home and work. ETURAS enhances the analysis of changing commute patterns by linking LEHD to road network files, allowing estimates of commute distance. ETURAS also offers visualization tools, including the generation of dot density maps showing changes in the place of work for residents of any user-defined geography (UDG) and changes in the place of residence for workers in any UDG. This article will demonstrate ETURAS's output using two analysis areas as examples. Case studies offer two main conclusions: (1) ETURAS enhances the ability of planners to analyze locational affordability and balancing jobs and housing; and (2) although LEHD is a powerful tool for analyzing commute patterns, it is necessary to validate LEHD using other data sources and local knowledge.

Prior research on regional differences in income levels has focused almost exclusively on market mechanisms that affect wages. This article argues that federal policy has had significant effects on changes in regional income inequality, and that these effects have rarely been analyzed. Since 1969, an increase in transfer payments and financial deregulation have increased the share of national income going to transfers and financial income. To show how these changes played out spatially, this article offers a decomposition of the difference in income growth between ten of the fastest-growing metropolitan regions and the United States as a whole, for the period 1969-2019. In most of the regions with the fastest income growth, financial and transfer income account for most of the difference in income growth rates between region and nation. Literature on regional income inequality would benefit from paying more attention to unearned income, and from engaging more fully with literature on financialization.

Since 1970, households in elite percentiles of the national income distribution have received an increasing share of national income. Simultaneously, several high-income states have expanded their shares of national income. This article investigates the relationship between the increasing concentration of income among the wealthiest households, the increasing geographic concentration of the wealthiest households, and relative changes in state per capita income. An increasing share of the super-rich accounts for much of the difference in income growth between the richest northeastern states and the rest of the country. Several other states with fast-growing income levels, however, experienced more balanced growth.

In recent decades, income divergence between the richest and poorest states in the United States has occurred, contradicting the prediction of neoclassical theory that income growth rates should converge over time. This article places neoclassical theory in dialogue with alternative bodies of literature: financialization, world cities, and uneven development. Using Mississippi and Connecticut as cases, a decomposition shows income divergence between these two states has been caused by two phenomena related to financialization: a growing geographic concentration of the highest-income households, and an increasing share of income claimed by these households.

This short communication describes a package written in the Python language that facilitates analysis and visualization of transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions at sub-county scales. Known as the Small Area Greenhouse Gas Estimation Tool (SAGGET), the toolkit uses outputs from the Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) emission model to create emissions estimates and projections for user-defined geographies. The Python scripts issue calls to third party geoprocessing libraries; separate versions of the toolkit are available for use in conjunction with the ArcGIS library produced by ESRI, and for the open-source SpatiaLite extension to the SQLite database engine. We demonstrate the capacity of the toolkit by presenting small-area emissions estimates for the St. Louis region as a whole, and for a specific transportation corridor. The package is freely available from the East-West Gateway Council of Governments.

The economic turmoil of the last 2 years has shown that hyper-globalized capitalism is inherently crisis prone, and that it has been unable to create sustainable prosperity. Unfortunately, the left has failed to convincingly refute Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that “there is no alternative.” There is, however, a growing social movement that aims to promote small, locally-scaled enterprises. This essay argues that the local economy movement can potentially provide a unifying principle for a new progressive agenda. However, localizers must take seriously the possible loss of gains from trade. In addition, it is important to resist a naive localism that romanticizes the local while ignoring action at other scales.

Floodplains in the United States are designated by the federal government as special flood hazard areas (SFHA). There is a dearth of published work on the effect of SFHA designation on property values in noncoastal areas. This research note addresses this lacuna by analyzing home sales prices in St. Louis County, Missouri. A hedonic model with correction for spatial autocorrelation indicates that being located in a SFHA reduces the value of a property by about 8.6%, including both direct and indirect effects. This information is relevant to ongoing policy discussions regarding weakened levee systems in the United States.

This article provides a quantitative test of the relationship between adaptive capacity and socio-economic status (SES) at the municipal level. Local participation in a U.S. floodplain management program, the Community Rating System (CRS), is used as an indicator of adaptive capacity. The relationship between aggregated measures of SES and CRS participation is tested using probit, OLS and tobit models. The analysis indicates that socio-economic characteristics of a municipality's population are associated with the capacity of municipal leaders to effect collective action in response to environmental challenges. More theoretical work and case studies are needed to fully explain the reasons for this association.

The term "family gap" refers to differences in income between households with children and households without children. Previous work has used the welfare state typology proposed by Esping-Andersen to explain differences in family gaps among western nations. This paper contributes to family gap literature by analyzing the structure of the family gap in seven countries. Using quantile regression models, family gaps are decomposed into male and female hours, male and female hourly pay, transfer payments and taxes. Using Esping-Andersen's typology, mothers in Continental nations participate in the labor market far less than their counterparts in other nations. Parents in Anglophone nations receive less income from social transfer payments. However, variations within each group of nations are considerable. Policies that explain the differing structure of the family gap in the seven nations include maternal leave, social transfers and the presence of "tax-splitting."