Matthew Drennan has been a Visiting Professor in the department since 2004. He is an Emeritus Professor, City and Regional Planning, Cornell University.
Research
His central research interest has been how an evolving structure of national economic activity is manifested in the transformation of metropolitan economies. He has argued that the relative decline in goods production and distribution activities and the relative rise in information intensive activities, producer services and advanced consumer services, have altered the urban hierarchy. His current funded research seeks to measure urban agglomeration economies with spatial and temporal variations in commercial office rents, using a data base for 122 major office markets over 20 years. He recently completed a research project addressing the failure of California’s small interior metro areas to match the economic growth of the state’s large coastal areas. Earlier, the Brookings Institution funded a demographic and economic study of Upstate New York carried out by Drennan and a few other professors at Cornell University.
BOOKS
The Information Economy and American Cities, 2002. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Methods of Interregional and Regional Analysis. 1998. With Walter Isard, Iwan Azis, Ronald Miller, Sidney Saltzman, and Erik Thorbecke. Lishers Ltd.Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Readings in State and Local Public Finance. 1997. Editor with Dick Netzer. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
ARTICLES
“Falling Behind: California’s Interior Metropolitan Areas,” with Michael Manville, Berkeley Planning Journal, Vol. 21, 2008.
“Economics: Diminishing Marginal Utility” Challenge, September-October, 2006
“Possible Sources of Wage Divergence among Metropolitan Areas of the United States,” Urban Studies, Vol. 42, No. 9, 2005.
“Unit Root Tests of Sigma Income Convergence Across U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” with Jose Lobo and Deborah Strumsky, Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 4, No. 5, 2004.
“Transition and Renewal; The Emergence of a Diverse Upstate Economy,” with Rolf Pendall and Susan Christopherson. Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, the Brookings Institution, January, 2004.
“The Economic Benefits of Public Investment in Transportation: A Review of Recent Literature,” Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2003.
“Sectoral Shares, Specialization, and Metropolitan Wages in the United States, 1969-1996,” with Shannon Larsen, Jose Lobo, Deborah Strumsky, and Wahyu Utomo. Urban Studies, Vol. 39, June, 2002.
“A Simple Test for Convergence of Metropolitan Income in the United States,” with Jose Lobo. Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 46, pp 350-359, 1999.
“National Structural Change and Metropolitan Specialization in the United States.” Papers in Regional Science, Vol. 78, pp 297-318, 1999.
"The Performance of Metropolitan Area Industries," Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Economic Policy Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, February, 1997.
"The Interruption of Income Convergence and Income Growth in Large Cities in the 1980s," with Emanuel Tobier and Jonathan Lewis, Urban Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, February, 1996.
"The Fiscal Problems of the Two New Yorks: What Happened This Time," Public Budgeting and Finance, Summer, 1994.
"Gateway Cities: The Metropolitan Sources of U.S. Producer Service Exports," Urban Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2, 1992.
"Information-Intensive Industries in Metropolitan Areas of the United States", Environment and Planning A, Vol. 21, 1989.
"An Econometric Model of New York City and Region: What It Is and What It Can Do," Economic Development Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 4, November, 1989.
BOOK CHAPTERS
“The Economic Cost of Disasters- Permanent or Ephemeral?” in Economic Costs and Consequences of Terrorism, Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson, eds, Edward Elgar, 2007.
"The Dominance of International Finance by London, New York and Tokyo," in The Global Economy in Transition, P. W. Daniels and W. F. Lever, eds., Longmans Ltd., 1996.
"The Changing Economic Functions of the New York Region," in Research in Urban Economics, Vol. 10, R.D. Norton, editor, JAI Press Inc., 1996.
