Explaining the Prevalence, Scaling and Variance of Urban Phenomena

Andres Gomez-Lievano (), Oscar Patterson-Lomba and Ricardo Hausmann
Additional contact information
Andres Gomez-Lievano: Center for International Development at Harvard University
Oscar Patterson-Lomba: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

No 329, CID Working Papers from Center for International Development at Harvard University

Abstract: The prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size. We propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity, and cultural evolution to derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in scaling exponents and average prevalence across phenomena, as well as the difference in the variance within phenomena across cities of similar size. The central ideas are that a number of necessary complementary factors must be simultaneously present for a phenomenon to occur, and that the diversity of factors is logarithmically related to population size. The model reveals that phenomena that require more factors will be less prevalent, scale more superlinearly and show larger variance across cities of similar size. The theory applies to data on education, employment, innovation, disease and crime, and it entails the ability to predict the prevalence of a phenomenon across cities, given information about the prevalence in a single city.

Keywords: urban; phenomena (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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http://growthlab.cid.harvard.edu/files/growthlab/f ... enomena_cidwp329.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Explaining the prevalence, scaling and variance of urban phenomena (2017)
Working Paper: Explaining the Prevalence, Scaling and Variance of Urban Phenomena (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cid:wpfacu:329

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