City size and urban labor productivity in China: New evidence from spatial city-level panel data analysis

The previous literature has generally found that most Chinese cities were undersized in the 1990s. However, little is known about how urban agglomeration in China has evolved since the country began to experience much faster urbanization and deep marketization after 2000. Based on panel data of 281 cities between 2000 and 2013, our spatial panel data regression results show that the scale impact of city size on urban productivity appears to have an inverted U shape, and its effect will grow when the cities’ industrial structure becomes more dominated by the service sector. There are also significant spatial interactions and spatial heterogeneity of urban agglomeration among Chinese cities. Furthermore, we compute the optimal size for each city and find that most Chinese cities are still undersized in recent years. Based on our findings, we argue that the Chinese government should focus on promoting sufficient growth of medium sized cities in its new urbanization strategy.     

Cross-Sectional Evolution of the U.S. City Size Distribution

We report nonparametrically estimated stochastic transition kernels for the evolution of the distribution of U.S. metropolitan area populations, for the period 1900 to 1990. These suggest a fair amount of uniformity in the patterns of mobility during the study period. The distribution of city size is predominantly characterised by persistence. Additional kernel estimates do not reveal any stark differences in intra-region mobility patterns. We characterise the nature of intra-size distribution dynamics by means of measures that do not require discretisation of the city size distribution. We employ these measures to study the degree of mobility within the U.S. city size distribution and, separately, within regional and urban subsystems. We find that different regions show different degrees of intra-distribution mobility. Second-tier cities show more mobility than top-tier cities.     

Product diversification,production systems,and economic performance in U.S. agricultural production

The U.S. agricultural sector is experiencing significant structural change. Farm size is rising and activities are broadening, including more off-farm employment, implying economic incentives for larger and more diversified farms, and complementarities among agricultural netputs. We quantify such patterns for farms in the corn belt, by measuring scale economies, and output and input contributions and jointness. We estimate the multi-output and -input production technology by stochastic frontier techniques applied to output and input distance functions. We find that both scope and scale economies have important economic performance implications, and that an input-oriented framework including off-farm income best characterizes agricultural production.     

An indirect test of efficient city sizes

This paper develops a model which demonstrates necessary conditions for efficient distribution of labor across areas given the presence of agglomeration economies and congestion externalities. An indirect empirical test for efficient allocation is formulated based on a comparison of estimated agglomeration economies with the compensating variation in occupation-specific wages needed to attract workers to larger cities. The results of this test suggest that there are specific city size ranges where necessary conditions for efficient allocation of resources are not met, particularly for cities in the 1.5 to 2.5 million population range. Current claims that continued growth of the largest U. S. cities is inefficient are not confirmed by the empirical results.     

Urban growth and subcenter formation: A trolley ride from the Staples Center to Disneyland and the Rose Bowl

The long-term trends of urbanization suggest: not only have more cities formed, but the leading metropolises have grown larger, with a number of peripheral subcenters developing over time. Conventional models of urban growth are limited, in that commuting cost and congestion eventually result in decreasing returns in a monocentric city as population becomes very large. We construct a general-equilibrium model with dynamic interactions between spatial agglomeration and urban development, driven by location-dependent knowledge spillovers. Our contribution allows endogenous development of subcenters to capture benefits from knowledge spillovers and offset diminishing returns from urban congestion, thus permitting more sustained city growth.     

"空间失配"假设及对中国城市问题研究的启示

对美国学者在"空间失配"假设方面的研究及其对政策的影响进行了回顾,提出在研究中应重点关注在中国城市就业、城市交通规划、土地利用规划和城市改造拆迁四个方面应用"空间失配"假设的可能性和必要性.     

DETERMINANTS OF CITY GROWTH AND OUTPUT IN INDIA

To investigate what determines urban population and economic growth, the determinants of urban population growth and economic output in India are examined empirically. City growth and economic output regressions are estimated using several approaches. Since only growing areas are usually designated as towns, the urban population of districts that are larger geographical areas than cities are estimated. It is found that, at the district level, manufacturing has a positive impact on city size, and proximity to large cities causes nearby cities to be larger, reflecting agglomeration effects.     

The Economics of Anti-Begging Regulations

A bstract    The Supreme Court has ruled that asking for money is a form of protected speech. However, it has also ruled that restrictions on the time, place, and manner of begging are constitutional. This paper examines 71 U.S. cities to determine what factors influence a city's propensity to enact anti-begging regulations. The logistic regression results indicate that cities with higher welfare benefits are less likely to regulate begging. Cities with higher crime rates, higher proportions of disabled citizens, and higher proportions of college-educated citizens, and cities that are more densely populated are more likely to regulate begging.
While historians, ethnographers, and legal scholars have studied issues related to begging, economists generally have not. This paper uses the traditional economic model of rational choice to examine why some U.S. cities regulate begging and others do not.     

Entrepreneurship and survival dynamics of immigrants to the U.S. and their descendants

Many studies have explored the determinants of entering into entrepreneurship and the differences in self-employment rates across racial and ethnic groups. However, very little is known about the survival in entrepreneurship of immigrants to the U.S. and their descendants.We adopt a modeling framework based on duration analysis, which takes into account both the fact that the stock of entrepreneurs initially observed represents a selected sample and the inability of observing in the data the exit time for some spells. Unlike previous studies, we find a lower survival probability in entrepreneurship for Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants, which does not carry on to their U.S.-born descendants. We also find that these two immigrant groups tend to enter entrepreneurship from unemployment or inactivity and they are more likely to exit towards employment in the wage sector, suggesting that entrepreneurship represents for them an intermediate step from non-employment to paid employment.     

The welfare economics of city bigness

Money wages will vary among cities in an economy with perfect labor mobility, due to differences in costs of producing nontraded goods. Commuting costs contribute to making money wages higher in large cities. Increasing negative technological externalities, such as pollution and congestion, also make money wages higher in larger cities. Such externalities tend to make big cities too big, because marginal is greater than average externality. Internalizing the externalities would be likely to make a city larger if the externalities emanate from production of nontraded goods, but might make the city smaller if the externalities emanate from export production.     

High-speed rail network and urban agglomeration economies: Research from the perspective of urban network externalities

High-speed rail (HSR) has greatly promoted cross-regional economic activities, but few studies have been conducted from the perspective of urban network externalities (UNEs). Based on data from China from 2008 to 2019, this paper constructs an HSR operation network model to study the impact of the network position (NP) on urban agglomeration economies (UAEs) by jointly employing network and econometric analysis methods. The findings suggest the following: (1) Improvements to NP significantly enhance UAEs. Improving the comprehensive NP by 1% will increase urban output per capita by 193.5–226.8 RMB. The findings hold under several robustness tests. (2) The NP's facilitation of growth in UAEs is reflected mainly in national core cities, while the impact of peripheral cities reflects a “∽-shaped” curve as their distance from each nearest neighboring core city changes. (3) From the temporal-dynamic perspective, the NP's impact on UAEs appeared one year before the HSR line was opened and was fully realized three years after the opening of the HSR. (4) Investment agglomeration and expansions in borrowed size are the main mediating mechanisms whereby NP facilitates UAEs.     

US city-size distribution and space

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on spatial city-size distribution in the United States. It proposes a new distance-based approach to analyze the influence of distance on the city-size distribution parameter by considering the Pareto distribution and using data from different definitions of US cities in 2010. Considering all possible combinations of cities within a 300-mile radius, the results indicate that the Pareto distribution cannot be rejected in most cases regardless of city size. Placebo regressions validate the results, thereby confirming the significant effect of geography on the Pareto exponent.     

长三角地区城市间互动关系分析——基于交通的视角

交通条件的改善正在带来长三角地区城市间关系的新变化。随着长三角地区交通网络的逐步完善,相对欠发达城市与相对较发达城市之间的发展差距有缩小的趋势,长三角地区城市间互动发展的圈层分化现象在加剧,长三角城市区域正逐步走向扁平化发展。     

Housing-choice hindrances and urban spatial structure: Evidence from matched location and location-preference data in Chinese cities

In a monocentric city with a well-functioning residential market, Pareto-efficient spatial equilibrium entails the sorting of residents according to their bid–rent gradient in descending order away from city center. Violation of this sorting condition creates opportunities for Pareto-improving trading of locations and can be sustained only if the market is hindered. We propose a simple ordered-location-choice model using matched location and location-preference data of individual households to examine violations of the Pareto-efficient spatial sorting condition. In so doing we are able to identify population groups facing housing-choice hindrances. We find in a sample of Chinese cities undergoing housing market liberalization that poor marketability of the previously state-provided homes, inadequate provision of housing finance, and spatial mismatch between job-market and housing-market opportunities contribute to a Pareto-inefficient spatial structure.     

Communication externalities in cities

To identify communication externalities in French cities, we exploit a unique survey recording workplace communication of individual workers. Our hypothesis is that in larger and/or more educated cities, workers should communicate more. In turn, more communication should have a positive effect on wages. By estimating both an earnings and a communication equation, we find evidence of communication externalities. In larger and more educated cities, workers communicate more and in turn this has a positive effect on their wages. Depending on the estimates, we find that 13 to 22% of the effects of a more educated and larger city on wages percolate through this channel.     

Financial analyst coverage for U.S. firms facing foreign competition: Evidence from trade liberalization

This study examines financial analyst coverage for U.S. firms following an increase in foreign product market competition. To capture exogenous shocks to domestic firms' competitive environments, we exploit a quasi‐natural experiment from large import tariff reductions over the 1984 to 2005 period in the manufacturing sector. Using data for the years before and after large tariff reductions, our difference‐in‐differences analysis shows evidence of a significant decrease in analyst coverage for incumbent U.S. firms when they face greater entry threat from foreign competitors. We also find that analysts with less firm‐specific experience and less accurate prior‐period forecasts are more likely to stop following the domestic firm when foreign competition intensifies. Overall, the findings suggest that foreign product market competition from global trade liberalization is an important determinant of financial analysts' coverage decisions.     

Shrinking Cities,Shrinking Households,or Both?

Household size decline accounts for a substantial portion of population loss in shrinking cities, yet little research has focused on it. Much of the literature presents a simple growth/decline binary that is largely determined via population figures. In this paper, we highlight the importance and assess the impact of household size changes on population decline, and determine what types of household size declines are more acute in shrinking cities than other locales. We find that elderly households and households with school-aged children are under-represented in shrinking cities, while households with pre-school-aged children are over-represented. More tellingly, we find the biggest source of household-related loss in shrinking cities to be the growth of single-person households now living in houses that were once home to entire families. These findings puncture the binary on which much of the shrinking cities discourse is based. The population dynamics of most cities are subtler than either practitioners or critical scholars assert. We argue that plans and development strategies for shrinking cities should reflect a range of demographic changes, including outmigration and internal household restructuring.     

The effects of city size and moving costs on public project benefits

This paper uses a simulation model to investigate the benefits of an urban public project when the size of the system of cities (or regions) in which migration occurs can vary and when moving costs impede migration. The model captures the range of possibilities between the perfectly open and closed city cases. We find that the total number of households migrating between cities declines sharply as moving costs rise. Also the level and distribution of project benefits between renters and landowners in the project city and other cities is sensitive to both the level of moving costs and the size of the urban system. The total benefits of the project fall by half or more when moving costs are introduced, even when moving costs themselves are netted out.     

Asymmetric volatility spillovers between international economic policy uncertainty and the U.S. stock market

This paper studies the asymmetric spillover effect of important economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the S&P500 index. We use monthly EPU indexes from Australia, Canada, China, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. and the realized volatility of the U.S. stock market to study the asymmetric pairwise directional spillovers on the U.S. stock market from 2000 to 2019. We find that S&P500 index volatility is a net recipient of spillovers from important EPU indexes. Japanese EPU has the strongest spillover effect on the U.S. stock markets, while EPU from the U.K. plays a very limited role. By decomposing the volatility into good and bad volatility, we find that the relationship between bad stock market volatility and EPU is stronger than between good volatility and EPU. Time-varying spillover characteristics show that bad volatility reacts more strongly to shocks in EPU following the debt crisis and trade negotiations. Several robustness checks are provided to verify the novelty of these findings.     

城市空间结构优化与区域经济协调发展——以江西省为例

城市是区域的增长极。随着区域与城市空间联系的不断加强,城市空间结构在区域经济协调发展中的地位和作用日益凸显。城市布局不合理、城乡发展不协调、城市体系不健全以及中心城市向心力不足等城市空间结构问题是制约江西区域经济协调发展的突出问题。为此,优化城市空间结构是推动江西区域经济协调发展的必由之路。