At a Boston Fed conference on regional disparities, and am learning a lot 1/ bostonfed.org/housedivided20…
The stylized fact about America used to be that unemployment differences between regions were transitory, because people moved. And as a paper by Russ and Shambaugh says, this used to be true 2/ 
But now it's not true at all: unemployment differences very persistent 3/
At some meta level this is part of a broader story in which the America that lives in our minds is no longer the America we actually live in. We think of ourselves as a land of great mobility, social and geographical both. These days we are neither 4/
