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It is obvious that holding city population constant, differences in cities across the world are enormous. Urban giants in poor countries are not large using measures such as land area, interior space or value of output. These differences are easily reconciled mathematically as population is the product of land area, structure space per unit land (i.e., heights), and population per unit interior space (i.e., crowding). The first two are far larger in the cities of developed countries while the latter is larger for the cities of developing countries. In order to study sources of diversity among cities with similar population, we construct a version of the standard urban model (SUM) that yields the prediction that the elasticity of city size with respect to income could be similar within both developing countries and developed countries. However, differences in income and urban technology can explain the physical differences between the cities of developed countries and developing countries. Second, using a variety of newly merged data sets, the predictions of the SUM for similarities and differences of cities in developed and developing countries are tested. The findings suggest that population is a sufficient statistic to characterize city differences among cities within the same country, not across countries.

Cities and towns --- Global cities --- Municipalities --- Towns --- Urban areas --- Urban systems --- Human settlements --- Sociology, Urban --- Infrastructure --- Labor --- Macroeconomics --- Real Estate --- Demography --- General Equilibrium and Welfare Economic Analysis of Regional Economies --- Land Use Patterns --- Housing Supply and Markets --- Transportation: Demand, Supply, and Congestion --- Safety and Accidents --- Transportation Noise --- Transportation Systems: Government and Private Investment Analysis --- Economic Development: Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis --- Housing --- Technological Change: Choices and Consequences --- Diffusion Processes --- Demographic Economics: General --- Aggregate Factor Income Distribution --- Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs: General --- Population & demography --- Labour --- income economics --- Property & real estate --- Population and demographics --- Income --- Wages --- Housing prices --- National accounts --- Prices --- Population --- Saving and investment --- United States

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How Should We Measure City Size? Theory and Evidence Within and Across Rich and Poor Countries.

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A large literature documents the positive influence of a city's skill structure on its rate of economic growth. By contrast, the effect of a city's age structure on its economic growth has been a hitherto largely neglected area of research. This paper hypothesizes that cities with more working-age adults are likely to grow faster than cities with more children or seniors. The paper sets out the potential channels through which such differential growth may occur. Using data from a variety of historical and contemporary sources, it shows that there exists marked variation in the age structure of the world's largest cities, across cities and over time. It then studies how age structure affects economic growth for a global cross-section of mega-cities. Using various identification strategies, the analysis finds that mega-cities with higher dependency ratios, that is, with more children and/or seniors per working-age adult, grow significantly slower. Such effects are particularly pronounced for cities with high shares of children. This result appears to be driven mainly by the direct, negative effects of a higher dependency ratio on the size of the working-age population and the indirect effects on work hours and productivity for working-age adults within a city.

Age Structure --- Agglomeration Effect --- Aging --- Demographics --- Dependency Ratio --- Economic Theory and Research --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Human Capital --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Urban Development --- Urban Economic Development --- Urbanization

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Violent conflicts present a formidable threat to regional economies. Throughout the world, border regions in many countries are possibly impacted by the cross-border economic effects of regional insurgencies in neighboring countries or national state failures, id est "bad neighbors". This raises two questions. First, what is the magnitude of the spill-over economic effects of foreign conflict and what are the channels through which they operate Second, what policies can governments adopt in the potentially exposed regions to mitigate such spill-over effects. In this paper, we adopt a difference-in-difference (DiD) framework leveraging the unexpected rise of the Boko Haram insurgency in Northeastern Nigeria in 2009 to study its economic effects in neighboring areas in Cameroon, Chad and Niger that were not directly targeted by Boko Haram activities. We find strong cross-border economic effects that are likely driven by reduced trade activities, not the diffusion of conflict. Factors of local economic resilience to this foreign conflict shock then include trade diversification and political and economic securitization. More generally, conflicts, if they have regional economic effects, may necessitate regional responses.

Armed Conflict --- Conflict --- Conflict and Development --- Inequality --- Labor Markets --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Migration --- Poverty Reduction --- Social Protections and Labor --- Trade