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<p>Does the movement of people between cities influence the economic prosperity of
those cities? I examine highway and air travel network data for continental US cities
between 2000 and 2010 to argue that it might. My argument consists of three analyses.
The first uses network ARMA modeling to show that there is an association between
the US travel network and city median income. However, the explanatory contribution
of the network varies from 2\% to 16\%, depending on the model specified. The second
uses two-stage dyadic linear modeling to establish directionality, showing that the
association is less likely to reflect the influence of prosperity on travel networks
than vis versa. However, these models explain only 17\% of the variation in traffic
volumes. The third addresses causality. It uses a natural experiment design to
demonstrate that natural disasters in distant countries correspond to diminished city
median incomes for the US cities with connections to them, but not for a propensity-matched
sample of unconnected cities. However, the finding are not statistically significant
at the .05 level (p= .09), and the estimated size of the effect is implausibly large.
Together, the analyses examine the association, directionality and causation, raising
the possibility that the movement of people between networks influences the prosperity
of those cities.</p>
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