ABSTRACT
The Ohio ridge Cities Project is a research effort involving faculty and staff from the eight state universities in die Ohio Urban University Program (UUP). The purpose of the Urban University Program is to link resources of Ohio's urban universities in a cooperative effort to improve the state's urban regions. For the years 1995 and 1996 this was one of the UUP's major research efforts. The project sought to expand on the concept of edge cities as put forth by Joel Garreau (1991) and others. It is the first large-scale cooperative statewide research project utilizing the Ohio Economic Development Data Base. The data base is a quarterly record of individual business establishments employment and earnings maintained by the Urban Center of the Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University. It is derived from data generated by the Ohio Bureau of Employment Services unemployment files (ES-202). The files contain not only employment and earnings data, but business establishments' street addresses and four-digit Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. As a result, establishment-level employment data could be retrieved using postal zip codes, allowing for analysis of employment data by specific geographic areas. 1 First-quarter data for 1994 were used for this research. These data were the most up-to-date figures available.
