Two innovations in the last century have changed dramatically the cost of communicating and transmitting information: The first is the widespread adoption of telephony; the second is the internet. We study the implications of these changes in ICT for urban structure. We find robust evidence that...

The confluence of factors driving urban growth is highly complex, resulting from a combination of ecological and social determinants that co-evolve over time and space. Identifying these factors and quantifying their impact necessitates models that capture both why urbanization happens as well...

In this paper we show that the recent model by Duranton (AER, 2007) performs remarkably well in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simple rank-size rule known as Zipf's law. The main mechanism of this theoretical framework is the churning of industries...

Urban spatial structures are shaped by market forces interacting with regulations, primary infrastructure investments and taxes. They are usually the unintended result of unforeseen consequences of policies and regulations that were designed without any particular spatial concerns. However,...

The salient rank-size rule known as Zipf's law is not only satisfied for Germany's national urban hierarchy, but also for the city size distributions in single German regions. To analyze this phenomenon, we build on the insights by Gabaix (1999) that Zipf's law follows from a stochastic growth...

We discuss theoretical approaches to study the relationship between the size distribution of a nation's cities and macroeconomic growth. The discussion is based on the hypothesis of the New Growth Theory that inter-personal spillovers of education and skills determine the long-run growth of the...

Die Größenstruktur der deutschen Städte folgt so wie in vielen anderen Ländern einer strengen Gesetzmäßigkeit: dem Zipfschen Gesetz. Es gibt starke Hinweise, dass dieses Zipfsche Gesetz nicht nur auf nationaler Ebene gilt, sondern auch auf der Ebene von Bundesländern und teilweise sogar...

In der Stadtökonomie ergeben sich die Formen der sektoralen und der ringförmigen Stadtstruktur als mögliche Ergebnisse der Segregation von demographisch verschiedenen Haushalten mit Nachbarschaftsexternalitäten. Rose-Ackerman [1973] postuliert, dass die Ringstruktur die Folge der Minimierung...

This article attempts a formal analysis of the connection between property tax and urban sprawl in U.S. cities. We develop a theoretical model that includes households (who are also landlords) and land developers in a regional land market. We then test the model empirically based on a national...

We consider a search-matching model in which black workers are discriminated against and the job arrival rates of all workers depend on social networks as well as distance to jobs. Location choices are driven by the racial preferences of households (both blacks and whites) consciously choosing...