We consider the distribution of economic activity within a country in light of three leading theories - increasing returns, random growth, and locational fundamentals. To do so, we examine the distribution of regional population in Japan from the Stone Age to the modern era. We also consider the...

We analyze a neoclassical general-equilibrium model to explain cross-metro variation in population, density, and land supply based on three amenity types: quality-of-life, productivity in tradables, and productivity in non-tradables. We develop a new method to estimate elasticities of housing...

Urban density boosts productivity and innovation, improves access to goods and services, reduces typical travel distances, encourages energy-efficient construction and transport, and facilitates sharing scarce amenities. However, density is also synonymous with crowding, makes living and moving...

If one ranks cities by population, the rank of a city is inversely related to its size, a well-documented phenomenon known as Zipf's Law. Further, the growth rate of a city's population is uncorrelated with its size, another well-known characteristic known as Gibrat's Law. In this paper, I show...

The received economic wisdom is that cities are too big and that public policy should limit their sizes. This wisdom assumes, unrealistically, that city sites are homogeneous, migration is unfettered, land is given freely to incoming migrants, and federal taxes are neutral. Should those...

I study the impact of transportation on health in the rural US, 1820–1847. Measuring health by average stature, I find that greater transportation linkage, as measured by market access, in a cohort's county-year of birth had an adverse impact on its health. A one-standard deviation increase in...

One of the most important representations of an urban spatial structure is its density. Indeed, an urban area is defined as a densely populated place with a sizeable number of inhabitants. Yet, despite the fact that the defining element of an urban area is its density, few scholars have...

We analyze a large dataset of commercial records produced by Assyrian merchants in the 19th Century BCE. Using the information collected from these records, we estimate a structural gravity model of long-distance trade in the Bronze Age. We use our structural gravity model to locate lost ancient...