Does the New Economic Geography Explain U.S. Core-Periphery Population Dynamics? Mark Partridge 1 Dan Rickman 2 Kamar Ali 3 M. Rose Olfert 3 This version: September 1, 2007 For Presentation at the Transatlantic Land Use Conference Washington, DC, September 25, 2007 Abstract The New Economic Geography (NEG) was motivated by the desire to formally explain the emergence of the American urban system. Although the NEG has proven useful in this regard, few empirical studies investigate its success in explaining current population dynamics in a more developed mature urban system, particularly for rural hinterlands and small urban centers. This study explores whether proximity to higher-tiered urban centers affected the patterns of 1990-2000 U.S. county population growth. Rather than growth shadows, the results suggest that larger urban centers promote growth for more proximate places of less than 250,000 people. However, some evidence of growth shadows is found for small metropolitan areas, while the largest metropolitan areas cast growth shadows on proximate medium-sized ones. Generally, NEG propositions only partially explain current core-periphery population dynamics, suggesting a need for a broader framework in understanding population movements and land use patterns. Keywords: Growth shadows, population growth, settlement patterns, spatial interactions. 1. AED Economics, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. Phone: 614-688-4907; Fax: 614-688- 3622; Email: partridge.27@osu.edu, webpage: http://aede.osu.edu/programs/Swank/ . 2. Department of Economics, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, Phone: 405-744-1434, Fax: 405-744-5180. Email: dan.rickman@okstate.edu. 3. Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Saskatchewan. E-mails: kamar.ali@usask.ca and rose.olfert@usask.ca Acknowledgements: We thank Jordan Rappaport and Taisuke Nakata of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City for generously providing Stata codes for the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation. We appreciate comments we received on earlier versions at Central Florida University and the 45 th Annual Meetings of the Southern Regional Science Association.