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Scholarly work on “shrinking” cities grew following the 2010 census, resulting in a diverse body of popular and academic literature. However, this has not produced a widely accepted definition of the “shrinking city.” We analyze definitions used in a sample of papers on U.S. shrinking cities and propose an empirically justified definition that reflects the shrinking cities research agenda and is easily operationalized. We demonstrate that our resulting universe of eighty cities represents the places studied in the literature and provides a starting point for future research. We hope to draw scholars to a shared understanding of this pressing topic.

Few studies empirically estimate the effects of metropolitan growth on nonmetropolitan communities at a national scale. This paper estimates the growth effects of 276 MSAs on population in 1,988 nonmetropolitan communities in the United States from 2000 to 2007. We estimate the distance for growth spillovers from MSAs to nonmetropolitan communities and test the assumption that a single MSA influences growth. We compare three methods of weighting cities’ influence: nearest city only, inverse‐distance, and relative commuting flow to multiple cities. We find the inverse‐distance approach provides slightly more reliable and theoretically supportable results than the traditional nearest city approach.

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