In this paper, we put forth the view that the potential for urbanisation economies increases with interaction opportunities. On the basis of that premise, three properties are key to an agglomeration index, which should: (i) increase with the concentration of population and conform to the...

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...

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...

The completion of transportation infrastructure frequently takes many years and occurs gradually. How does the gradual construction of transportation infrastructure affect the distribution of economic activity across the sites it serves? I examine the long-run effects of the timing of railroad...

This paper compares the size distribution of cities when they are measured in both demographic and economic terms. In doing so, we have exploited more recent and accurate nighttime lights data than those previously used to proxy urban economic activity. Our results for a sample covering 12,852...

The empirical literature on city size distributions has mainly focused on the USA. The first major contribution of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the evolution and structure of the West-German city size distribution. Using a unique annual data set that covers most of the 20th...

There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also differ along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of more than 10,000 American cities, we find that older cities in the...

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...

We construct a unique data set to analyze whether or not a large temporary shock had an impact on German city growth and city size distribution. Following recent work by Davis and Weinstein (2001) on Japan, we take the strategic bombing of German cities during WWII as our example of such a...