Urban structures and urban growth rates are highly persistent. This has far-reaching implications for the optimal size and timing of new construction. We prove that rational developers postpone construction not because prospects are gloomy, but because they are bright. The slow mean reversion in...

Since 1980, economic growth in the U.S. has been fastest in its largest cities. We show that a group of skill- and information-intensive service industries are responsible for all of this new urban bias in recent growth. We then propose a simple explanation centered around the interaction of...

This paper studies urban growth in Korean cities. First, I document that population growth patterns change over time and that the current population distribution supports random urban growth. I confirm two empirical laws-Zipf's law and Gibrat's law-both of which hold in the period of 1995-2015,...

Social capital is often place-specific while schooling is portable, so the prospect of migration may reduce the returns to social capital and increase the returns to schooling. If social capital matters for urban success, it is possible that an area can get caught in a bad equilibrium where the...

Previous work on transportation investments has focused on average impacts in high- and middle-income countries. We estimate average and heterogeneous effects in a poor continent, Africa, using roads and cities data spanning 50 years in 39 countries. Using changes in market access due to distant...

Process of economic growth and development has been shifted towards new strategies of entrepreneurship, institutional developments and market development. The shifting of development process towards new strategies needs human capital, developed infrastructure and effective policy reforms. This...

As countries rapidly urbanize, settlements are expanding into hazardous flood zones. This study provides a global analysis of spatial urbanization patterns and the evolution of flood exposure between 1985 and 2015. Using high-resolution annual data, it shows that settlements across the world...

The paper estimates the political connection premium for Italian cities tracked during the second half of the 1900s, when the role of the state in the economy was very widespread. It leverages the peculiar features of the gridlocked political landscape in place between the end of World War II...

Extensive use of industrial land has been typical for many cities in China since the end of the previous century. One of the most important reasons is the local governments’ strategy choice in land use. In this research, a governance structure from the view of the tax-sharing system and the...

As countries rapidly urbanize, settlements are expanding into hazardous flood zones. This study provides a global analysis of spatial urbanization patterns and the evolution of flood exposure between 1985 and 2015. Using high-resolution annual data, it shows that settlements across the world...

As countries rapidly urbanize, settlements are expanding into hazardous flood zones. This study provides a global analysis of spatial urbanization patterns and the evolution of flood exposure between 1985 and 2015. Using high-resolution annual data, it shows that settlements across the world...

Urban structures and urban growth rates are highly persistent. This has far-reaching implications for the optimal size and timing of new construction. We prove that rational developers postpone construction not because prospects are gloomy, but because they are bright. The slow mean reversion in...

We study the link between subnational capital cities and urban development using a global data set of hundreds of first-order administrative and capital city reforms from 1987 until 2018. We show that gaining subnational capital status has a sizable effect on city growth in the medium run. We...

According to Gibrat’s law for cities, population shocks have permanent effects on city size. I examine this implication by analysing the persistence of observed population shocks: German military casualties in WWI by municipality of birth. I find a strong negative effect of military casualties...

This paper analyses Russian city growth during the command and transition eras. Our main focus is on understanding the extent to which market forces are replacing command forces, and the resulting changes in Russian city growth patterns. We examine net migration rates for a sample of 171 medium...

We construct a unique data set to analyze whether or not a large temporary shock had an impact on German city growth and city size distribution. Following recent work by Davis and Weinstein (2001) on Japan, we take the strategic bombing of German cities during WWII as our example of such a...

This paper utilizes a national sample of nearly 1,600 households linked in the census manuscript schedules to investigate causes and consequences of migration to urban areas during the midst of America's industrial revolution. Although record linkage was limited to the subset of households that...

Historical city growth, in the United States and worldwide, has required remarkable transformation of outdated durable buildings. Private land-use decisions may generate inefficiencies, however, due to externalities and various rigidities. This paper analyzes new plot-level data in the aftermath...

This paper models and examines empirically the evolution of cities in an economy. Twentieth century evolution in the USA is characterized by parallel growth of cities of different types and on-going entry of new cities, together maintaining a stable relative size distribution of cities. Each...

Recent theories of economic growth, including Romer (1986), Porter (1989) and Jacobs (1969), have stressed the role of technological spillovers in generating growth. Because such knowledge spillovers are particularly effective in cities, where communication between people is more extensive, data...

We document several empirical regularities regarding the evolution of urban structure in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas over the period 1980-1990. These regularities relate to changes in resident population, employment, occupations, as well as the number and size of establishments in...

The 1990s were an unusually good decade for the largest American cities and, in particular, for the cities of the Midwest. However, fundamentally urban growth in the 1990s looked extremely similar to urban growth during the prior post-war decades. The growth of cities was determined by three...

This paper analyzes the contribution of import competition to the regional divergence among US metropolitan areas over recent decades. I document that the sharp rise in imports of Chinese manufacturing goods had a significant effect on the spatial skill polarization and the divergence of college...

Just three decades ago, Shenzhen was a modest fishing village of 30,000 people on the south coast of China. Today, it is a booming metropolis of 10 million inhabitants, boasting modern skyscrapers, packed shopping malls, and a state-of-the-art transportation system. The breathtaking speed at...

By drawing from every corner of the world and every academic discipline that could implicate cities, City, State: Constitutionalism and the Megacity does a praiseworthy job of calling out the constitutional silence of cities and making a case for their enhanced constitutional standing. There is...

Most economic activity occurs in cities. This creates a tension between local increasing returns, implied by the existence of cities, and aggregate constant returns, implied by balanced growth. To address this tension, we develop a theory of economic growth in an urban environment. We show that...

What impact will terrorism have on America's cities? Historically, large-scale violence has impacted cities in three ways. First, concentrations of people have an advantage in defending themselves from attackers, making cities more appealing in times of violence. Second, cities often make...

From 1940 to 1990, a 10 percent increase in a metropolitan area's concentration of college-educated residents was associated with a .8 percent increase in subsequent employment growth. Instrumental variables estimates support a causal relationship between college graduates and employment growth,...

We examine the relationship between urban characteristics in 1960 and urban growth (income and population) between 1960 and 1990. Our major findings are that income and population growth move together and both types of growth are (1) positively related to initial schooling, (2) negatively...

As measured by the pace of city growth in western Europe from 1000 to 1800. absolutist monarchs stunted the growth of commerce and industry. A region ruled by an absolutist prince saw its total urban population shrink by one hundred thousand people per century relative to a region without...

Recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish. I hypothesize that establishment of such a...

In this paper, we examine the determinants of Brazilian city growth between 1970 and 2000. We consider a model of a city, which combines aspects of standard urban economics and the new economic geography literatures. For the empirical analysis, we constructed a dataset of 123 Brazilian...

New York has been remarkably successful relative to any other large city outside of the sunbelt and it remains the nation's premier metropolis. What accounts for New York's rise and continuing success? The rise of New York in the early nineteenth century is the result of technological changes...

Cities can be thought of as the absence of physical space between people and firms. As such, they exist to eliminate transportation costs for goods, people and ideas and transportation technologies dictate urban form. In the 21st century, the dominant form of city living is based on the...

This article examines the relationship between institutional fragmentation and the spatial extent of cities in Europe’s Functional Urban Areas. European Union planning regulations vary across member states, but in most cases, local authorities determine land use within the more general...

The city beautiful movement, which in the early 20th Century advocated city beautification as a way to improve the living conditions and civic virtues of the urban dweller, had languished by the Great Depression. Today, new urban economic theory and policymakers are coming to see the provision...

We analyze the efficiency of urbanization patterns in a stylized dynamic model of urban growth with three sectors of production. Pollution, as a force that discourages agglomeration, is caused by domestic production. We show that cities are too large and too few in number in uncoordinated...

Many modern trade and growth models are characterized by multiple equilibria. In theory the analysis of multiple equilibria is possible, but in practice it is difficult to test for the presence of multiple equilibria. Based on the methodology developed by Davis and Weinstein (2004) for the case...

While an ever-growing percentage of the world’s population is urban, the rate at which cities grow is not uniform. The lifetime of individual cities includes periods of fast growth, slow growth and periods of shrinkage. There exists an extensive literature concerned with possible means to...