Studies have suggested that there exists job search and recruiting friction in urban areas. This paper constructs a two-sector (rural and urban) model involving this factor and investigates how it affects migration and what the optimal policies should be. An analysis shows that frictional urban...

The rank-size rule and Zipf's law for city sizes have been traditionally examined by means of OLS estimation and the "t" test. This paper studies the accurate and approximate properties of the OLS estimator and obtains the distribution of the "t" statistic under the assumption of Zipf's law...

This paper examines the importance of the distribution of consumers in Hotelling's circle on the comparison between the optimal and the market equilibrium levels of diversity. It finds that when most consumers are located very close to the firms, the result of Salop-that the equilibrium number...

We develop a duocentric-city model and show that the ratio between the property tax in the suburbs and in the center has an ambiguous impact on the size of the city. We test this model by using a dataset of effective property tax rates which we developed using GIS techniques for central cities...