TY  - JOUR
AU  - Glaeser, Edward L
AU  - Ponzetto, Giacomo A.M.
TI  - Did the Death of Distance Hurt Detroit and Help New York?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13710
PY  - 2007
Y2  - December 2007
DO  - 10.3386/w13710
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13710
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13710.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Edward L. Glaeser
Department of Economics
315A Littauer Center
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-0575
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: eglaeser@harvard.edu

Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto
CREI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 
IPEG and Barcelona GSE  
C/ Ramon Trias Fargas, 25-27  
08005 Barcelona  
Spain 
E-Mail: gponzetto@crei.cat
M1  - published as Edward L. Glaeser, Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto. "Did the Death of Distance Hurt Detroit and Help New York?," in Edward L. Glaeser, editor, "Agglomeration Economics" University of Chicago Press (2010)

AB  - Urban proximity can reduce the costs of shipping goods and speed the flow of ideas. Improvements in communication technology might erode these advantages and allow people and firms to decentralize. However, improvements in transportation and communication technology can also increase the returns to new ideas, by allowing those ideas to be used throughout the world. This paper presents a model that illustrates these two rival effects that technological progress can have on cities. We then present some evidence suggesting that the model can help us to understand why the past thirty-five years have been kind to idea-producing places, like New York and Boston, and devastating to goods-producing cities, like Cleveland and Detroit.
ER  -