This study presents a new CQ (cluster quotient) and 3Q (quality and quantity quotient) index to find the magnitude and type of creative clusters and highlights the relationship between creative industries and the urban economy. This study finds that California, MD is the creative cluster and California and Colorado play an important role in the creative industries across the USA. This study also finds that there is a significantly strong relationship between creative industries and the urban economy by employing a Seemingly Unrelated Regression model based on all US metropolitan statistical areas. The elasticities of creative industries and CQ are 0.48% and 0.67% for the gross domestic product (GDP), and the elasticities of the GDP are 0.24% for creative industries and 0.13% for CQ. These results show that they have positive interaction effects between them, and governments can utilise creative industries and creative clusters to develop their economies.

This paper aims to highlight how soft variables play an important role in travel mode choices in the New York metropolitan area. This study focuses on the effects of racial/ethnic affinities and travel purposes on travel mode choices. This study finds that racial/ethnic affinities play a different role in travel mode choices according to racial/ethnic groups. For instance, racial/ethnic affinities play a negative role in carpooling of whites for leisure, unlike other racial/ethnic groups. This result shows that the general hypothesis is wrong, that is, living in racial/ethnic neighborhoods has a positive impact on carpooling. This study highlights that travel mode choices are differentiated by travel purposes across racial/ethnic groups. For example, Hispanics are positively related to the household carpool for shopping, whereas they show a negative probability of that for school. The results show that urban planners should take soft variables into account for travel mode choices.

There is some doubt about the effect of creative class on economic development. There is also concern that the 3Ts index (Talent, Technology, and Tolerance) does not take into account two of the most important elements of creativity into its index: creative infrastructure and culture. The present study proposed a new creativity index called 3Ci (Creative class, Creative infrastructure, and Culture) and explored how they played an important role in economic development across countries through a systematic literature review and econometric models. The present study found that creative class played a different role in economic development across articles and countries and all 35 articles in the present study suggested creative infrastructure and culture as two of the most important factors for creativity. The present study also highlighted that creative class, creative infrastructure, and culture were positively related to economic development in all US Metropolitan Statistical Areas and they should be considered when measuring the magnitude of creative cities.