Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
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 …
Innovation, Firm Size Distribution, And Gains From Trade, Yi-Fan Chen, Wen-Tai Hsu, Shin-Kun Peng
Innovation, Firm Size Distribution, And Gains From Trade, Yi-Fan Chen, Wen-Tai Hsu, Shin-Kun Peng
Research Collection School Of Economics
We study a trade model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003) that is standard except that firm heterogeneity is endogenously determined by firms innovating to enhance their productivities. We show that the equilibrium productivity and firm-size distributions exhibit power-law tails under rather general conditions on demand and technology. In particular, the emergence of the power laws is essentially independent of the underlying primitive heterogeneity among firms. We investigate the model’s welfare implications, and conduct a quantitative analysis of welfare gains from trade. We find that, conditional on the same trade elasticity and values of the common parameters, our model …
Central Place Theory And City Size Distribution, Wen-Tai Hsu
Central Place Theory And City Size Distribution, Wen-Tai Hsu
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper proposes a theory of city size distribution via a hierarchy approach rather than the popular random growth process. It does so by formalizing central place theory using an equilibrium entry model and specifying the conditions under which city size distribution follows a power law. Central place theory describes the way in which a hierarchical city system with different layers of cities serving differently sized market areas is formed from a uniformly populated space. The force driving the city size differences in this model is the heterogeneity in economies of scale across goods. The city size distribution under a …