MARC Record from Scriblio

LEADER: 02537cam 22003257a 4500
001 2005617845
003 DLC
005 20050503162111.0
007 cr |||||||||||
008 050503s2005 mau sb 000 0 eng
010 $a 2005617845
040 $aDLC$cDLC
050 00 $aHB1
100 1 $aRossi-Hansberg, Esteban.
245 10 $aUrban structure and growth$h[electronic resource] /$cEsteban Rossi-Hansberg, Mark L.J. Wright.
260 $aCambridge, MA :$bNational Bureau of Economic Research,$cc2005.
490 1 $aNBER working paper series ;$vworking paper 11262
538 $aSystem requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
538 $aMode of access: World Wide Web.
500 $aTitle from PDF file as viewed on 5/3/2005.
530 $aAlso available in print.
504 $aIncludes bibliographical references.
520 3 $a"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 the urban structure is the margin that eliminates local increasing returns to yield constant returns to scale in the aggregate, which is sufficient to deliver balanced growth. In a multi-sector economy with specific factors and productivity shocks, the same mechanism leads to a city size distribution that is well described by a power distribution with coefficient one: Zipf's Law. Under certain assumptions our theory produces Zipf's Law exactly. More generally, it produces the systematic deviations from Zipf's Law observed in the data, including the under-representation of small cities and the absence of very large ones. In general, 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 relationship between the dispersion of city sizes and the variance of productivity shocks is consistent with the data"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
650 0 $aUrbanization$xMathematical models.
650 0 $aUrban economics$xMathematical models.
650 0 $aCities and towns$xGrowth$xMathematical models.
700 1 $aWright, Mark L. J.
710 2 $aNational Bureau of Economic Research.
830 0 $aWorking paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;$vworking paper no. 11262.
856 40 $uhttp://papers.nber.org/papers/W11262