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Common Power Laws For Cities And Spatial Fractal Structures, Tomoya Mori, Tony E. Smith, Wen-Tai Hsu
Common Power Laws For Cities And Spatial Fractal Structures, Tomoya Mori, Tony E. Smith, Wen-Tai Hsu
Research Collection School Of Economics
City-size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across a wide range of countries. But such distributions are also meaningful at other spatial scales, such as within certain regions of a country. Using data from China, France, Germany, India, Japan, and the United States, we first document that large cities are significantly more spaced out than would be expected by chance alone. We next construct spatial hierarchies for countries by first partitioning geographic space using a given number of their largest cities as cell centers and then continuing this partitioning procedure within each cell recursively. We find …
Geography, Trade And Power-Law Phenomena, Pao-Li Chang, Wen-Tai Hsu
Geography, Trade And Power-Law Phenomena, Pao-Li Chang, Wen-Tai Hsu
Research Collection School Of Economics
This article reviews interrelated power-law phenomena in geography and trade. Given the empirical evidence on the gravity equation in trade flows across countries and regions, its theoretical underpinnings are reviewed. The gravity equation amounts to saying that trade flows follow a power law in distance (or geographic barriers). It is concluded that in the environment with firm heterogeneity, the power law in firm size is the key condition for the gravity equation to arise. A distribution is said to follow a power law if its tail probability follows a power function in the distribution’s right tail. The second part of …