The paper contributes to the debate abouyt whether market incentives induce excessive concentration of the urban population in cities that are too large. It answers two related questions which have not been satisfactorily answered in the existing literature. The first is whether the very...

This paper discusses three aspects of urbanization: the effect of urbanization (that is, aggregate urban population growth) on agglomeration, the discontinuity of urban population partition among urban areas, and the failure of laissez-faire to induce the emergence of new urban areas...