A Statistical Test of City Growth: Location, Increasing Returns and Random Growth

Rafael González-Val and Jose Olmo

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This article analyzes the main existing theories on income and population city growth: the existence of increasing returns to scale, the importance of locational fundamentals, and random growth. To do this we develop a nonlinearity test that is implemented to a dataset on urban, climatological and macroeconomic variables on 1,175 U.S. cities. The conclusions of our analysis are that there are increasing returns to scale on city income growth; nevertheless, the most important variables to explain income growth are locational fundamentals. Both sets of variables need to be jointly considered to avoid inconsistent model parameter estimates. We also observe increasing returns to scale on population growth; larger cities grow at a faster pace than smaller cities. These cities are not, however, within the group of wealthiest cities implying the existence of a threshold on population beyond which per-capita income growth stagnates or even deteriorates.

Keywords: threshold nonlinearity test; locational fundamentals; multiple equilibria; random growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C13 C33 O10 R00 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27139/1/MPRA_paper_27139.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/32481/1/MPRA_paper_32481.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/56732/1/MPRA_paper_56732.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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