Political Economy of City Sizes and Formation

By Vernon Henderson, Randy A. Becker. 2000

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There are two paradigms of city formation and size—the competitive model of large-scale land developers operating in national land markets and the self-organization model of agglomeration. This paper examines the effects of local politics, urban classes, and restrictions in national land markets on city size and formation. It starts by introducing local politics into the two paradigms. Then it turns to a growth situation, where land developers initiate new settlements, but existing cities are either self-organized or governed locally. The paper also examines the politics of local no-growth movements and of governance of specially favored mega-cities.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d4b726474b4521a93e1dea9dc39114f356bb263

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Citations in the corpus

Urbanization and city growth: The role of institutions (2007, background): “…there is an effectively unlimited supply of equal quality sites upon which cities form, and city governments (public or private as in “large” developers) have the autonomy to form and invest in new cities and to limit populations through zoning and land use regulation (Henderson and Becker, 2000).”
Spatial disparities in developing countries: cities, regions, and international trade (2003, result): “9. This result is in contrast to that in a number of papers in the literature (for example, Anas 1992, Henderson and Becker 2000 ).”
Micro-Foundations of Urban Agglomeration Economies (2003, background): “…and employ them as intensively as possible.22 In an urban context, these ideas have been taken up by a small number of authors [Baumgardner (1988), Becker and Murphy (1992), Duranton (1998), Becker and Henderson (2000), Henderson and Becker (2000)].23 The exposition below follows Duranton (1998).”
Nursery Cities: Urban Diversity, Process Innovation and the Life-Cycle of Products (2001, background): “Pursuing this line of research, Henderson et al. (1995) show that, while urban diversity is indeed important for attracting new and innovative activities, a history of similar past specialization appears to matter more for retaining mature activities.”
Productive Cities: Sorting, Selection, and Agglomeration (2014, methodology): “Contrary to standard assignment problems, cities are endogenous and their equilibrium characteristics depend on the location choices of everyone.”
Urban Networks: Connecting Markets, People, and Ideas (2016, background): “We distinguish between skilled entrepeneurs and unskilled workers (Henderson and Becker 2000) and assume that the former a mobile, but the latter are not (Forslid and Ottaviano 2003).”
From Sectoral to Functional Urban Specialization (2001, unknown): “This is because of a well-known co-ordination problem associated with city formation (Henderson [24]; see also Henderson and Becker [26] for a careful discussion of this issue and a more detailed characterisation of the land developers’ problem).”
Land use externalities, open space preservation, and urban sprawl (2004, background): “Such interaction has been studied as a primary cause of edge city and community formation (Henderson and Becker, 2000; Henderson and Mitra, 1996; Henderson and Thisse, 2001).”
The Urbanization Process and Economic Growth: The So-What Question (2003, background): “…scale economies, excessive congestion, and excessive per capita infrastructure costs, while smaller cities have unexploited scale economies and often deficient capital investment (e.g., Tolley, Gardner, and Graves (1979), Fujita (1989), Henderson and Becker (2000), and Au and Henderson (2000)).”
Theories of systems of cities (2004, background): “Henderson and Becker (2000), AbdelRahman (1998) and Abdel-Rahman and Wang (1995, 1997) have different types of exogenously specified workers achieving different utility levels in equilibrium, while Abdel-Rahman (2002) endogenously generates household types.”
Viewpoint: From Cities to Productivity and Growth in Developing Countries (2008, unknown): “Primate city favouritism can work through a myriad of small decisions from underpriced gasoline and better provision of local public goods to better business opportunities for government cronies in the primate city (Henderson and Becker 2000; Henderson 2002a,b).”
From sectoral to functional urban specialisation (2005, background): “, Henderson and Becker [26]), transfers to workers are an adequate instrument for deve manipulate the production externality created by intermediate and business service suppliers to their ad Note that subsidies targeted at particular sectors or particular activities (e.”