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Despite ever-increasing public and financial support for public transportation in recent decades, transit ridership has dropped substantially in the 2010s across the United States. While many theories that explain the reasons behind the decline in ridership have been proposed, no consensus on the primary causes has been reached. By employing gradient boosting decision tree and counterfactual simulations, we examine the complex relationships between transit ridership and key internal and external factors from 2002 to 2017 in 85 of the largest urbanized areas in the US. Among several contributing factors, the declining cost of driving, measured by the decreasing share of carless households combined with lower gasoline prices, was the salient, most influential factor behind the recent decline. Neighborhood change in high-density neighborhoods also led to a moderate net loss in ridership. The only factor that has been mitigating further decline was an increase in transit services. Had this increase not occurred, loss of ridership would have been more than double the actual loss during the study period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates neighborhood scale net migration of young adults in the top 20 urbanized areas (UAs) in the United States between 1980 and 2010. Both descriptive and regression analyses show that Generation Xers and Millennials were more likely to net migrate into central locations and less aversive to high density at their young ages than late boomers were in the 1980s. Consumption amenities are a critical factor that distinguishes the net migration patterns between young and old adult groups and became a more important location factor for young adults in the 2000s (late Gen Xers and older Millennials) than in the 1990s (early Gen Xers). There exists a considerable degree of heterogeneity across UAs and neighborhoods even within the same UAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies empirically estimate the effects of metropolitan growth on nonmetropolitan communities at a national scale. This paper estimates the growth effects of 276 MSAs on population in 1,988 nonmetropolitan communities in the United States from 2000 to 2007. We estimate the distance for growth spillovers from MSAs to nonmetropolitan communities and test the assumption that a single MSA influences growth. We compare three methods of weighting cities' influence: nearest city only, inverse-distance, and relative commuting flow to multiple cities. We find the inverse-distance approach provides slightly more reliable and theoretically supportable results than the traditional nearest city approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agricultural sector is highly vulnerable to bioterrorism attacks with the potential for severe economic consequences. This article presents estimates of state-by-state total economic impacts of a hypothetical agroterrorism attack that uses foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) pathogens, which is one of the most contagious animal diseases and can be easily weaponized. The authors estimate the economic impacts across the U.S. states by applying the National Interstate Economic Model (NIEMO), a multiregional input output (MRIO) model. Total economic impacts range from $23 billion to $34 billion. The overwhelming sources of the losses are due to domestic and international demand cuts. The results of this research highlight the point that the economic impacts are nationwide, regardless of the location of the attack because of large-scale export losses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper develops a bottom-up approach that focuses on behavioral responses in estimating the total economic impacts of the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center (WTC) attacks. The estimation includes several new features. First, is the collection of data on the relocation of firms displaced by the attack, the major source of resilience in muting the direct impacts of the event. Second, is a new estimate of the major source of impacts off-site -- the ensuing decline of air travel and related tourism in the U.S. due to the social amplification of the fear of terrorism. Third, the estimation is performed for the first time using Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) analysis, including a new approach to reflecting the direct effects of external shocks. This modeling framework has many advantages in this application, such as the ability to include behavioral responses of individual businesses and households, to incorporate features of inherent and adaptive resilience at the level of the individual decision maker and the market, and to gauge quantity and price interaction effects across sectors of the regional and national economies. We find that the total business interruption losses from the WTC attacks on the U.S. economy were only slightly over $100 billion, or less than 1.0% of Gross Domestic Product. The impacts were only a loss of $14 billion of Gross Regional Product for the New York Metropolitan Area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]