This paper employs a new definition of urban areas as functional economic units developed by the OECD in collaboration with the European Union to investigate the size and sources of productivity disparities across urban areas in Great Britain. We use data from the UK Annual Survey of Hours and...

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...

We contrast evidence of urban path dependence with efforts to analyze calibrated models of city sizes. Recent evidence of persistent city sizes following the obsolescence of historical advantages suggests that path dependence cannot be understood as the medium-run effect of legacy capital but...

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 how the changing geographic distribution of skilled workers in the US affects theoretical models that use Gibrat's law to explain the size distribution of cities. In the empirical literature, a divergence hypothesis holds that college share increases faster in cities where...

The regional economics and geography literature on urban population size has in recent years shown interesting conceptual and methodological contributions on the validity of Gibrat’s Law and Zipf’s Law. Despite distinct modeling features, they express similar fundamental characteristics in...