Related papers: There's Nothing in the Air
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…
The expression "wage transition" refers to the fact that over the past two or three decades in all developed economies wage increases have levelled off. There has been a widening divergence and decoupling between wages on the one hand and…
This paper resolves the empirical puzzle in the public-private wage literature: why studies using similar data reach contradictory conclusions about wage premiums and penalties. Utilizing rich French administrative panel data (2012-2019),…
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…
Although it has been suggested that the shift from on-site work to telework will change the city structure, the mechanism of this change is not clear. This study clarifies how the location of firms changes when the cost of teleworking…
We analyse the income distributions of cities in France and the scaling of the income of different deciles as a function of the population. We find a significant difference in the scaling exponents for the richer and poorer parts of the…
A central socioeconomic concern about Artificial Intelligence is that it will lower wages by depressing the labor share - the fraction of economic output paid to labor. We show that declining labor share is more likely to raise wages. In a…
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…
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…
This paper investigates the relationship between job mobility and earnings growth in the UK labour market, with a focus on gender differences in the returns to switching jobs. Using data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE)…
Firms in denser areas are more productive, a pattern attributed to agglomeration economies and firm selection. To disentangle these two channels, the popular approach of Combes et al. (2012, ECTA) critically assumes that total factor…
Cities are typical dynamic complex systems that connect people and facilitate interactions. Revealing universal collective patterns behind spatio-temporal interactions between residents is crucial for various urban studies, of which we are…
Understanding and potentially predicting or even controlling urban labour markets represents a great challenge for workers and policy makers alike. Cities are effective engines of economic growth and prosperity and incubate complex dynamics…
The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on their movement patterns: the places they visit and how frequently they go there. In human society, where the prevalent form of cohabitation is in cities, the highly…
Developing a scientific understanding of cities in a fast urbanizing world is essential for planning sustainable urban systems. Recently, it was shown that income and wealth creation follow increasing returns, scaling superlinearly with…
The coupling between population growth and transport accessibility has been an elusive problem for more than 60 years now. Due to the lack of theoretical foundations, most of the studies that considered how the evolution of transportation…
Most cities in the US and in the world were organized around car traffic. In particular, large structures such as urban freeways or ring roads were built for reducing car traffic congestion. With the evolution of public transportation,…
Urban 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…
Cities are some of the most intricate and advanced creations of humanity. Most objects in cities are perfectly synchronised to coordinate activities such as jobs, education, transportation, entertainment, and waste management. Although each…
Economic activities favor mutual geographical proximity and concentrate spatially to form cities. In a world of diminishing transport costs, however, the advantage of physical proximity is fading, and the role of cities in the economy may…