Nonparametric employment subscenter identification

A two-stage procedure is proposed for identifying urban employment subcenters. The first stage identifies candidate subcenters as significant positive residuals in a smoothed employment density function. Subcenters are those sites that provide significant explanatory power in the second-stage, semiparametric employment density function estimation. The procedure can be applied to either aggregated or disaggregated data, does not require detailed knowledge of the study area, and is easily reproducible by other researchers. Results are presented for five previously studied cities-Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco-and a new one, New Orleans.