Models of city systems based on market theories are unable to replicate their size distribution. The stochastic process approach to size distribution, which asserts proportional growth, does not provide a strong economic foundation. Hence an apparent irreconcilability. We propose that since...

Metropolitan areas --unions of nearby built-up locations within which people travel on a day-to-day basis among places of residence, employment, and consumption--serve as a fundamental unit of economic analysis. But existing delineations of U.S. metro areas--including metropolitan Core-Based...

This chapter describes how the spatial distribution of economic activity changes as economies develop and grow. We start with the relation between development and rural–urban migration. Moving beyond the coarse rural–urban distinction, we then focus on the continuum of locations in an...

This chapter surveys recent developments in agglomeration theory within a unifying framework. We highlight how locational fundamentals, agglomeration economies, the spatial sorting of heterogeneous agents, and selection effects affect the size, productivity, composition, and inequality of...

This paper examines the micro-foundations of occupational agglomeration in U.S. metropolitan areas, with an emphasis on labor market pooling. Controlling for a wide range of occupational attributes, including proxies for the use of specialized machinery and for the importance of knowledge...

This paper studies a spatial pattern and a possible channel of local labor market inequality change. That is, large cities have the greater losses in the declining industries and greater gains in the growing industries. When the declining and growing industries are low-skilled and high-skilled...

This paper develops a micro-founded city systems model with an endogenous number of cities to explore whether local governments establish the optimal city size when production processes involve environmental pollution. Our analysis delivers two key insights. First, if an optimal scheme to...

In this paper we show that the double Pareto lognormal (DPLN) parameterization provides an excellent fit to the overall US city size distribution, regardless of whether "cities" are administratively defined Census places or economically defined area clusters. We then consider an economic model...

In this paper we show that the double Pareto lognormal (DPLN) parameterization provides an excellent fit to the overall US city size distribution, regardless of whether 'cities' are administratively defined Census places or economically defined area clusters. We then consider an economic model...

We provide definitive results to close the debate between Eeckhout (2004, 2009) and Levy (2009) on the validity of Zipf's law, which is the special Pareto law with tail exponent 1, to describe the tail of the distribution of U.S. city sizes. Because the origin of the disagreement between...