Large firms generate most American inventions. We know that cities are host to organizations of varying size and prevalence, but are these conditions important to urban system dynamics? This article presents volatility in patenting as a novel instrument for distinguishing between cities reliant...

This study investigates the relationship between the urban wage premium and employer concentration using Swedish full population employer-employee data. Departing from an AKM modeling framework to distinguish worker from firm specific heterogeneity - a measure of rent-sharing - we then measure...

Business cycles have affected urbanization processes worldwide. Despite strength and pervasiveness of recent stagnation waves, empirical evidence documenting the aggregate effect of economic downturns on metropolitan growth was relatively scarce in the old continent. The present study tests -...

"In recent years, urban policy-makers have been urged to adopt the development of urban policies for shrinking cities from an urban management perspective. However, urban management in shrinking cities is a difficult problem because it is fiscally restrictive compared with cities with growing...

The Henry George Theorem (HGT) in static models states that when a city has an optimal population size, aggregate urban differential land rents exactly cover costs of pure public goods. This paper extends the static HGT to dynamic settings. Through a series of dynamic models, the paper...

We examine how agglomeration economies have influenced labour earnings in France over forty years. First, we define cities dynamically to account for their changing footprints. Our findings show that aggregate wage growth is mainly driven by growth in larger cities, rather than smaller ones or...

We study the post-war effects of the bombing of German cities during WWII on urban growth and use the synthetic control method (SCM) to construct comparison units for affected West-German cities. The reason to use SCM is that cities might experience structural changes that have nothing to do...

This study investigates the effects of city size and administrative rank on rural-urban migration in China and examines the factors that influence the city size effect. We focus on unemployed while job-seeking migrants. Using data from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey for 2016 and 2017, we find...

Infectious diseases depend on intensified social intercourse within large cities, resulting in a super-linear allometric scaling law with city size. But how this scaling relationship changes throughout an evolving pandemic is seldom studied and remains unclear. Here, we investigate allometric...

This study extends the concept of granularity from firms to cities, examining how large cities influence national economic dynamics beyond their relative size. By applying Zipf's law, which describes the power law distribution of city sizes, we investigate the interplay between granularity and...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the empirical correlations between population distribution, urban economic structure, and spatial relationship to propose a conceptual classification framework for the Australian urban system. This paper sets the pre-COVID-19 benchmark for future research...

A growing literature investigates the “granular” origins of aggregate fluctuations in a variety of contexts. This paper builds on the theoretical framework developed by Gabaix (1999) and provides the first empirical evidence that agglomeration economies, derived from Zipf’s law of cities,...

This research utilizes a compensating differential framework to measure the social benefits of minor league baseball teams. Consistent with findings at the major league level, individual housing observations from 138 metropolitan areas between 1993 and 2005 show that affiliated teams are...

Cities increasingly address climate change, e.g. by pledging city-level emission reduction targets. This is puzzling for the provision of a global public good: what are city governments' reasons for doing so, and do pledges actually translate into emission reductions? Empirical studies have...

This paper evaluates the influence of the maximum-allowed floor area ratio (FAR) on the spatial size of Brazilian cities. We built a novel database on building height restrictions for the 325 largest cities in the country and combined it with recent satellite data. Our estimations show that, as...

We assess how minimum wage effects on restaurant employment in the U.S. vary with labor market size and monopsony power. Using city-level data, we construct monopsony proxies based on labor flows and concentration. Minimum wages bind less in larger cities, consistent with the urban wage premium,...

Improving the energy efficiency in the urbanization process is particularly important for China to pursue high-quality economic growth. Urbanization may change a city’s spatial structure, transforming it from a monocentric city to a polycentric one. Based on the panel data of China’s...

Finding suitable employment in a city is more challenging for married than unmarried migrants. This paper provides empirical evidence that the denser and more diversified labor markets in large cities help alleviate the colocation problem of married couples. Using data from China, we show that...

This paper empirically tests the relationship between city size and innovation output using panel data of Chinese cities from 2008 to 2018. The empirical results show that city size has a significant positive impact on innovation output. Without considering control variables, there is a...

Under the background of trade liberalization and new urbanization, it is of great significance to study how city opening leads to wage premium and improve income distribution. This paper examines the relationship between trade liberalization, city size and urban wage premium using micro data...

Finding suitable employment in a city is more challenging for married than unmarried migrants. This paper provides empirical evidence that the denser and more diversified labor markets in large cities help alleviate the colocation problem of married couples. Using data from China, we show that...

Zipf's law is a well-known empirical regularity of firm size distribution. To date, it remains a puzzle as to what is the identity of the firms that causes this regularity. We document the multi-plant firm origin of Zipf's law - plants of multi-plant fi rms (exponent close to one) are more...

This paper explores theoretically the formation of a system of cities in which ports affect the spatial location and the size of cities. We use a complex systems and economic geography approach to generate 2D cellular automata to simulate the formation of the landscape of urban agglomerations...

We document a novel stylized fact: Using data for several countries, we show that export activity is disproportionately concentrated in larger cities – even more so than overall economic activity. We account for this fact by marrying elements of international trade and economic geography. We...