One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies. This paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the U.S....

[...]What explains New York’s ongoing ability to dominateAmerica’s urban landscape? In this paper, we explore theeconomic history of the city and argue that three themesemerge. First, New York’s emergence as the nation’s premier port was not the result of happenstance followed by...