Related papers: Complex Economic Activities Concentrate in Large C…
There are many benefits and costs that come from people and firms clustering together in space. Agglomeration economies, in particular, are the manifestation of centripetal forces that make larger cities disproportionately more wealthy than…
Recent studies have found evidence of a negative association between economic complexity and inequality at the country level. Moreover, evidence suggests that sophisticated economies tend to outsource products that are less desirable (e.g.…
What drives formal employment creation in developing cities? We find that larger cities, home to an abundant set of complex industries, employ a larger share of their working age population in formal jobs. We propose a hypothesis to explain…
The city has proven to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on…
Agglomeration economies are a persistent subject of debate among economists and urban planners. Their definition turns on whether or not larger cities and regions are more efficient and more productive than smaller ones. We complement…
Diversified economies are critical for cities to sustain their growth and development, but they are also costly because diversification often requires expanding a city's capability base. We analyze how cities manage this trade-off by…
Urban outputs, from economy to innovation, are known to grow as a power of a city's population. But, since large cities tend to be central in transportation and communication networks, the effects attributed to city size may be confounded…
Estimating the capabilities, or inputs of production, that drive and constrain the economic development of urban areas has remained a challenging goal. We posit that capabilities are instantiated in the complexity and sophistication of…
We calculate measures of economic complexity for US metropolitan areas for the years 2007-2015 based on industry employment data. We show that the concept of economic complexity translates well from the cross-country to the regional…
Over the years, the growing availability of extensive datasets about registered patents allowed researchers to better understand technological innovation drivers. In this work, we investigate how the technological contents of patents…
Many large cities are found at locations with certain first nature advantages. Yet, those exogenous locational features may not be the most potent forces governing the spatial pattern of cities. In particular, population size, spacing and…
Understanding cities is central to addressing major global challenges from climate and health to economic resilience. Although increasingly perceived as fundamental socio-economic units, the detailed fabric of urban economic activities is…
As the current thermo-industrial civilization expands, its technological and societal complexities increase. We suggest that physical power, economic activity and societal complexity are linked. A simple, intuitive model based on Systems…
This study investigates the impact of the 2018 summer heat wave on urban mobility in Seoul and the role of economic complexity in the region's resilience. Findings from subway and mobile phone data indicate a significant decrease in the…
Cities are characterized by the presence of a dense population with a high potential for interactions between individuals of diverse backgrounds. They appear in parallel to the Neolithic revolution a few millennia ago. The advantages…
In several recent publications, Bettencourt, West and collaborators claim that properties of cities such as gross economic production, personal income, numbers of patents filed, number of crimes committed, etc., show super-linear…
How are economic activities linked to geographic locations? To answer this question, we use a data-driven approach that builds on the information about location, ownership and economic activities of the world's 3,000 largest firms and their…
Economic complexity is a powerful tool to estimate the productive capabilities and future growth of modern economies. Little is known of how economic complexity evolves over long periods in history. In this paper, we use archaeological…
We analyze the decisive role played by the complexity of economic systems at the onset of the industrialization process of countries over the past 50 years. Our analysis of the input growth dynamics, based on a recently introduced measure…
One perspective to view the economic development of cities is through the presence of multinational firms; how subsidiaries of various organizations are set up throughout the globe and how cities are connected to each other through these…