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 how the urban structure is the margin that eliminates local increasing returns to yield constant returns to scale in the aggregate, thereby implying a city size distribution that is well described by a power distribution with coefficient one: Zipf's Law. Under strong assumptions our theory produces Zipf's Law exactly. More generally, it produces the systematic deviations from Zipf's Law observed in the data, namely the under-representation of small cities and the absence of very large ones. In these cases, the model identifies the standard deviation of industry productivity shocks as the key parameter determining dispersion in the city size distribution. We present evidence that the dispersion of city sizes is consistent with the dispersion of productivity shocks in the data.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Society for Economic Dynamics in its series 2004 Meeting Papers with number
33.
Length: Date of creation: 2004 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:red:sed004:33
Contact details of provider: Postal: Society for Economic Dynamics Anne Stubing CV Starr Center for Applied Economics 269 Mercer Street, Room 303 New York University New York, NY 10003 Fax: 1-860-486-4463 Email: Web page: http://www.EconomicDynamics.org/society.htm More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christian Zimmermann).
Find related papers by JEL classification: E0 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General O4 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity R0 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Lucas, Robert E, Jr & Prescott, Edward C, 1971.
"Investment Under Uncertainty,"
Econometrica,
Econometric Society, vol. 39(5), pages 659-81, September.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.