This paper analyses the evolution of the European urban system from a long-term perspective (from 1300 to 1800) considering the historical data set of Bairoch et al. (1988). Using the method recently proposed by Clauset et al. (2009), a Pareto-type city size distribution (power law) is rejected...

The paper is devoted to problems of ensuring balanced and sustainable development of a very specific and important metropolitan region of the Russian Federation - the region of St Petersburg and surrounding it Leningrad Oblast. St.Petersburg (City) and Leningrad Oblast (Region) are both...

This paper proposes a novel methodology for delineating urban areas based on a machine learning algorithm that groups buildings within portions of space of sufficient density. To do so, we use the precise geolocation of all 12 million buildings in Spain. We exploit building heights to create a...

This study approaches the question whether it “pays” to live in big(ger) cities in a three-fold manner: first, it estimates how city size affects worker productivity (agglomeration benefits) in Germany, based on individual-level wage data. Second, it considers whether productivity benefits...

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...

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 urban growth in Korean cities. First, I document that population growth patterns change over time and that the current population distribution supports random urban growth. I confirm two empirical laws-Zipf's law and Gibrat's law-both of which hold in the period of 1995-2015,...

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...

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...

We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are "too small" to follow Zipf's law.