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Title: Essays in Urban and Spatial Economics

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2025

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7916/07e2-2g67

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Abstract: The essays in this dissertation concern the distribution of people and economic activity across space at the national, regional, and urban levels. The first chapter studies the consistent power law observed in city-size distributions across countries, often referred to as Zipf’s law. To study this phenomenon, we analyze a general spatial equilibrium framework with heterogeneous locations, where trade and the locational productivities and amenities are subject to random variation in geographic and climatic characteristics. We prove how population is distributed spatially due to such random variation across space, demonstrating how population is lognormally distributed within countries and that the largest locations, i.e. cities, within countries appear to follow a power law.

Url: https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/07e2-2g67

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Authors: Easton, Matthew

Institution: Columbia University

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Pages: 1-195

Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data

Topics: Land Use/Urban Organization

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