Industrial Development in Cities

Henderson, J. Vernon; Kuncoro, Ari; Turner, Matthew A.

doi:10.3386/w4178

Cited by 304 publications

(450 citation statements)

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“…Furthermore, in 1950, there were two cities of more than 10 million, and, in 1995, there were 15 cities of more than 10 million. The latter fact has been shown by Hus and Abdel-Rahman (1998), Glaeser et al (1992) and Henderson, Kuncoro, and Turner (1995) among others. Some of the important forces behind the formation of cities are: (1) information spillover among firms that enhance productivity, as has been argued by Lucas (1988), and documented by Henderson (1986), among others, and (2) the accumulation of human capital, as has been argued by Marshall (1890), through acquisition of training and education as a contributor to productivity.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 59%

Does the Structure of an Urban System Affect Income Disparities?

Abdel-Rahman

2002

Journal of Regional Science

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In this paper I analyze the impact of basic training and specialized training on the distribution of skill, income disparity, social welfare, and on the structure of a decentralized specialized city system. This is done in a spatial general-equilibrium model of a closed economy producing a single consumption good. The economy is populated with a continuum of unskilled labor with potential heterogeneous ability. The only consumption good can be produced by specialized technology or by general technology. Specialized technology requires specialized training that enables each worker to transform his potential ability into productivity. General technology requires basic training that enables all workers, independent of their potential ability, to produce the good at a constant marginal product. In this framework I show that such an equilibrium exists uniquely and is efficient. Then I characterize the conditions that lead to a different distribution of skills, a different system of cities, and generate income disparity endogenously. Thus, the paper presents a link among income disparities, social welfare, and the structure of an urban system that is new to this literature. Copyright 2002 Blackwell Publishers Inc.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 59%

Does the Structure of an Urban System Affect Income Disparities?

Abdel-Rahman

2002

Journal of Regional Science

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“…Hence, we conclude that w ∝ 1/ d . This relationship is an expression of the abundant evidence in economics for knowledge specialization – a decrease in d ( N ) – as the source of increases in (labor) productivity19323334. However, this view of productivity per se cannot be the target of optimization: no city has become rich by reducing its occupational diversity to a single activity!…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This reflects the primary role of urban environments in promoting the production of new ideas and stimulating socioeconomic development31516. However, counter-arguments have also emerged noting that specialized cities are, at specific times, more productive16171819. Familiar examples are contemporary Silicon Valley or manufacturing cities in their heyday such as Manchester or Detroit.…”

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confidence: 99%

Professional diversity and the productivity of cities

Bettencourt

Samaniego

Youn

2014

Sci Rep

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Attempts to understand the relationship between diversity, productivity and scale have remained limited due to the scheme-dependent nature of the taxonomies describing complex systems. We analyze the diversity of US metropolitan areas in terms of profession diversity and employment to show how this frequency distribution takes a universal scale-invariant form, common to all cities, in the limit of infinite resolution of occupational taxonomies. We show that this limit is obtained under general conditions that follow from the analysis of the variation of the occupational frequency across taxonomies at different resolutions in a way analogous to finite-size scaling in statistical physical systems. We propose a theoretical framework that derives the form and parameters of the limiting distribution of professions based on the appearance, in urban social networks, of new occupations as the result of specialization and coordination of labor. By deriving classification scheme-independent measures of functional diversity and modeling cities as social networks embedded in infrastructural space, these results show how standard economic arguments of division and coordination of labor can be articulated in detail in cities and provide a microscopic basis for explaining increasing returns to population scale observed at the level of entire metropolitan areas.

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“…Furthermore, and in tradition of urban economic analysis, the investigation contains variables for concentration, diversification and city size, and indicators related to technology and the knowledge base. The seminal paper is Glaeser et al (1992) and the subsequent work of Henderson et al (1995) and Henderson (1997), who estimate sector-specific regressions for different sectors, explaining employment change by local industrial and city-specific variables.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%