scholarly journals Commuting network effect on urban wealth scaling

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luiz G. A. Alves ◽  
Diego Rybski ◽  
Haroldo V. Ribeiro

AbstractUrban scaling theory explains the increasing returns to scale of urban wealth indicators by the per capita increase of human interactions within cities. This explanation implicitly assumes urban areas as isolated entities and ignores their interactions. Here we investigate the effects of commuting networks on the gross domestic product (GDP) of urban areas in the US and Brazil. We describe the urban GDP as the output of a production process where population, incoming commuters, and interactions between these quantities are the input variables. This approach significantly refines the description of urban GDP and shows that incoming commuters contribute to wealth creation in urban areas. Our research indicates that changes in urban GDP related to proportionate changes in population and incoming commuters depend on the initial values of these quantities, such that increasing returns to scale are only possible when the product between population and incoming commuters exceeds a well-defined threshold.

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. e0245771
Author(s):  
Haroldo V. Ribeiro ◽  
Milena Oehlers ◽  
Ana I. Moreno-Monroy ◽  
Jürgen P. Kropp ◽  
Diego Rybski

Urban scaling and Zipf’s law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated independently and are often perceived as disassociated matters. Here we present a large scale investigation about the connection between these two laws using population and GDP data from almost five thousand consistently-defined cities in 96 countries. We empirically demonstrate that both laws are tied to each other and derive an expression relating the urban scaling and Zipf exponents. This expression captures the average tendency of the empirical relation between both exponents, and simulations yield very similar results to the real data after accounting for random variations. We find that while the vast majority of countries exhibit increasing returns to scale of urban GDP, this effect is less pronounced in countries with fewer small cities and more metropolises (small Zipf exponent) than in countries with a more uneven number of small and large cities (large Zipf exponent). Our research puts forward the idea that urban scaling does not solely emerge from intra-city processes, as population distribution and scaling of urban GDP are correlated to each other.


Author(s):  
Andrés Gómez-Liévano ◽  
Vladislav Vysotsky ◽  
José Lobo

We show how increasing returns to scale in urban scaling can artificially emerge, systematically and predictably, without any sorting or positive externalities. We employ a model where individual productivities are independent and identically distributed lognormal random variables across all cities. We use extreme value theory to demonstrate analytically the paradoxical emergence of increasing returns to scale when the variance of log-productivity is larger than twice the log-size of the population size of the smallest city in a cross-sectional regression. Our contributions are to derive an analytical prediction for the artificial scaling exponent arising from this mechanism and to develop a simple statistical test to try to tell whether a given estimate is real or an artifact. Our analytical results are validated analyzing simulations and real microdata of wages across municipalities in Colombia. We show how an artificial scaling exponent emerges in the Colombian data when the sizes of random samples of workers per municipality are 1% or less of their total size.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (329) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicja Anna Olejnik

Recent findings emphasise the importance of localised returns to scale for the regional growth as well as for the agglomeration processes. However, it is still not well established whether returns to scale are constant or increasing, and to what extent. Therefore, in this study we apply specification which describes the productivity growth with the growth of output through the Verdoorn’s law. This study aims to provide some new estimates of the degree of returns to scale for EU regions. Our findings show that the hypothesis of increasing returns to scale is still valid in today’s EU economy. To test the hypothesis, we have employed the Multidimensional Spatial Panel Durbin Model with Spatial Fixed Effects. The research is conducted for 261 regions of the EU 28. The paper concludes that increasing returns to scale in EU regions are substantial.


Author(s):  
Erik den Hartigh

From the 1980s, network effects attracted a lot of interest in economics and management sciences. This was mainly due to the work of Arthur (e.g., 1988, 1989, 1990). While the subject of increasing returns to scale in companies had a long tradition in economics, network effects (i.e., increasing returns in markets) had hardly been addressed.


Author(s):  
Rudolf Cesaretti ◽  
José Lobo ◽  
Luis M. A. Bettencourt ◽  
Michael E. Smith

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