Definition Matters: Metropolitan Areas and Agglomeration Economies in a Large Developing Country

Maarten Bosker, Mark Roberts and Jane Park

No 13359, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: A variety of approaches to delineate metropolitan areas have been developed. Systematic comparisons of these approaches in terms of the urban landscape that they generate are however few. This paper aims to fill this gap. The paper focuses on Indonesia and makes use of the availability of data on commuting flows, remotely-sensed nighttime lights, and spatially fine-grained population, to construct metropolitan areas using the different approaches that have been developed in the literature. The analysis finds that the maps and characteristics of Indonesia’s urban landscape vary substantially, depending on the approach used. Moreover, combining information on the metro areas generated by the different approaches with detailed micro-data from Indonesia’s national labor force survey, the paper shows that the estimated size of the agglomeration wage premium depends nontrivially on the approach used to define metropolitan areas.

Keywords: Metro areas; Urban definitions; Agglomeration economies; Indonesia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 O18 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-sea and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13359 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Definition matters. Metropolitan areas and agglomeration economies in a large-developing country (2021)
Working Paper: Definition Matters: Metropolitan Areas and Agglomeration Economies in a Large Developing Country (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13359

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13359

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().