City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. One popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a...

Standard approaches to studying industrial agglomeration have been in terms of scalar measures of agglomeration within each industry. But such measures often fail to distinguish spatial scales of agglomeration. In a previous paper, Mori and Smith (2014) proposed a pair of quantitative measures...

In this chapter we look at the spatial distribution of economic activities in China and Japan. Japan has excellent data and relatively uniform institutions since World War II, which allow us to track its spatial evolution and detail its key features today. For Japan we show how structural shifts...