Employment Growth in the American Urban Hierarchy: Long Live Distance
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
New information technologies and reductions in transportation costs have led pundits to pronounce the "death of distance." These claims would suggest that distance is no longer a barrier to growth for remote areas and small urban centers. Despite extensive research on the localized effects of agglomeration, very few studies have empirically investigated the broader spillover effects of proximity and location in the urban system. This study attempts to fill this void using U.S. county level employment data. A primary innovation is that urban centers, from which distance is measured, are differentiated by their position within six tiers (rural plus 5 urban) of the American urban hierarchy. Net agglomeration economies can thus originate from multiple sources throughout the entire 360° span. Our findings indicate that proximity to higher-tiered urban centers continues to be an important positive determinant of local job growth, all the way from the smallest to largest urban centers.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it