We report nonparametrically estimated nonlinear stochastic transition kernels for the evolution of the distribution of populations of metropolitan areas, for the period 1900 to 1990, based on US Census data. Comparison of kernels across successive time periods with the kernel for a pooled sample...

We use data for metro areas in the United States, from the US Census for 1900 - 1990, to test the validity of Zipf's Law for cities. Previous investigations are restricted to regressions of log size against log rank. In contrast, we use a nonparametric procedure to calculate local Zipf exponents...

We test implications of economic geography models for location, size and growth of cities with US Census data for 1900 û 1990. Our tests involve non-parametric estimations of stochastic kernels for the distributions of city sizes and growth rates, conditional on various measures of market...

For thousands of years, the Chinese and many other nations around the workd built defensive walls around their cities. This phenomenon is not well understood from an economic perspective. To rationalize the existence of city walls, we propose a simple model that relates the deimesions of city...

The paper extends the Brock-Durlauf social interactions model to richer social structures modelled with arbitrary interaction topologies and examines in detail the star, the wheel and the path. It explores Nash equilibria when agents act on the basis of expectations over, and, alternatively,...

This paper studies purely empirically aspects of the distribution of income within small neighborhoods and contrasts it with the income distribution at higher level of aggregation, such as census tracts and metropolitan areas. It relies on a unique feature of the American Housing Survey, whose...

The paper describes within-neighborhood economic segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas in 1985 and 1993. It uses the neighborhood clusters of the American Housing Survey, standardized by metropolitan area income and household size, to explore income distribution within neighborhoods at a scale...

This paper develops a model of housing decisions which allows for social interactions within residential neighborhoods to impact homeowners' valuation of their own properties. The model is used to structure an empirical investigation with data from the American Housing Survey for 1985 and 1989....

The paper adapts to richer social structures the Brock-Durlauf model of interactive discrete choice, where individuals’ decisions are influenced by the decisions of others. Social structure is modelled by a description of who interacts with whom, by means of a graph, with individuals as...