This is a short essay on open questions in urban economic theory.

We criticize the theories used to explain the size distribution of cities. They take an empirical fact and work backward to obtain assumptions on primitives. The induced theoretical assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity...

The tomahawk bifurcation is used by Fujita et al. (1999) in a model with two regions to explain the formation of a core-periphery urban pattern from an initial uniform distribution. Baldwin et al. (2003) show that the tomahawk bifurcation disappears when the two regions have an uneven population...

Using Japanese prefecture-level data for the years 1979 and 1996, I explore the extent to which inequality, age heterogeneity, and human capital have an effect upon neighborhood trust, which is ordinarily considered as a kind of particularized trust. The major findings are as follows: (1) Income...

The long-term trends of urbanization suggest: not only have more cities formed, but the leading metropolises have grown larger, with a number of peripheral subcenters developing over time. Conventional models of urban growth are limited, in that commuting cost and congestion eventually result in...

In the present paper, the inverted-U shape relationship between growth and inequality found in Chen(2003), is reexamined. We decompose productivity growth into efficiency improvement, capital accumulation and technological progress and then ascertain their determinants by employing a fixed...

The modern literature on city formation and development, for example the New Economic Geography literature, has studied the agglomeration of agents in size or mass. We investigate agglomeration in sorting or by type of worker, that implies agglomeration in size when worker populations differ by...

This paper examines the cubic form hypothesis and the flying geese pattern hypothesis of income distribution. We use time series data for the Gini coefficients of Korea for 1961-2006 and panel data calculated based on a household income survey for the period 1998-2003. We show; (1) The Korean...

Canonical analysis of the classical general equilibrium model demonstrates the existence of an open and dense subset of standard economies that possess fully-revealing rational expectations equilibria. This paper shows that the analogous result is not true in urban economies. An open subset of...

The modern literature on city formation and development, for example the New Economic Geography literature, has studied the agglomeration of agents in size or mass. We investigate agglomeration in sorting or by type of worker, that implies agglomeration in size when worker populations differ by...