Urban-regional economics, social system accounts, and eco-behavioral science

Urban-Regional Economics, Social System Accounts, and Eco-Behavioral Science contains a dozen key essays originally published during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s by one of the premier scholars of modern economics.

Known already in the 1950s for technical innovations in the economic analysis of demand, in the early 1960s Fox broadened his social-science frame of relevance to explore more complex issues of urban-regional interdependence, socioeconomic modeling, social system accounts, and eco-behavioral analysis.

A prolific writer, Fox has since contributed to the literature of a number of disciplines beyond his original base in economics. Geographers, sociologists, urban planners, and social psychologists have become part of Fox's expanding audience, and his impact has been significant in several of these other fields.

For example, his work on the geography of economic interaction led him to view the United States as an array of "functional economic areas." Each area includes the workplaces; homes; and shopping, educational, and social structures of the daily lives of the vast majority of its residents. This work underlies the widely used BEA economic areas and associated data systems published by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis since 1969.

Fox's more recent work on behavior settings appears as a featured chapter in the definitive volume on ecological psychology prepared by Phil Schoggen and published in 1989 by Stanford University Press.

Intended to complement Fox's earlier collection, Demand Analysis, Econometrics, and Policy Models (published by ISU Press in 1992), the present selection of essays provides contemporary readers ready access to the best of the diverse and insightful work of a highly creative social scientist. An autobiographical preface and special introductions by the editors and Phil Schoggen provide historical context to the individual essays and to the collection as a whole.