Related papers: There's Nothing in the Air
Cities attract a daily influx of non-resident commuters, reflecting their roles within wider urban networks -- not as isolated places. However, it remains unclear how this interconnectivity shapes the way crime scales with population, given…
Urban transformations within large and growing metropolitan areas often generate critical dynamics affecting social interactions, transport connectivity and income flow distribution. We develop a statistical-mechanical model of urban…
We argue that the recent growth in income inequality is driven by disparate growth in investment income rather than by disparate growth in wages. Specifically, we present evidence that real wages are flat across a range of professions,…
The share of the world population living in cities with more than one million people rose from 11% in 1975 to 24% in 2025 (our estimates). Will this trend towards greater concentration in large cities continue or level off? We introduce two…
Throughout history most young adults have chosen to live where their parents did while a smaller number moved away. This is sufficient, by proof and simulation, to account for the well-known power law distributions of city sizes. The model…
Migration plays a crucial role in urban growth. Over time, individuals opting to relocate led to vast metropolises like London and Paris during the Industrial Revolution, Shanghai and Karachi during the last decades and thousands of smaller…
The amount of data that is being gathered about cities is increasing in size and specificity. However, despite this wealth of information, we still have little understanding of what really drives the processes behind urbanisation. In this…
The spatial heterogeneity of cities -- the uneven distribution of population and activities -- is fundamental to urban dynamics and related to critical issues such as infrastructure overload, housing affordability, and social inequality.…
We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of…
In recent decades the world has experienced rates of urban growth unparalleled in any other period of history and this growth is shaping the environment in which an increasing proportion of us live. In this paper we use a longitudinal…
Researches on the human mobility have made great progress in many aspects, but the long-term and long-distance migration behavior is lack of in-depth and extensive research because of the difficult in accessing to household data. In this…
Is there a general economic pathway recapitulated by individual cities over and over? Identifying such evolution structure, if any, would inform models for the assessment, maintenance, and forecasting of urban sustainability and economic…
This paper examines how loss aversion affects wages offered by employers and accepted by job seekers. I introduce a behavioral search model with monopsonistic firms making wage offers to job seekers who experience steeper disutility from…
Many outputs of cities scale in universal ways, including infrastructure, crime, and economic activity. Through a mathematical model, this study investigates the interplay between such scaling laws in human organization and governmental…
A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population,…
Understanding how size influences the internal characteristics of a system is a crucial concern across various fields. Concepts like scale invariance, universalities, and fractals are fundamental to this inquiry and find application in…
Economists disagree about the factors driving the substantial increase in residual wage inequality in the US over the past few decades. To identify changes in the returns to unobserved skills, we make a novel assumption about the dynamics…
Despite the potential of online sharing economy platforms such as Uber, Lyft, or Foodora to democratize the labor market, these services are often accused of fostering unfair working conditions and low wages. These problems have been…
Urban scaling laws summarize how urban attributes evolve with city size. Recent criticism questions notably the aggregate view of this approach, which leads to neglecting the internal structure of cities. This is all the more relevant for…
The science of cities seeks to understand and explain regularities observed in the world's major urban systems. Modelling the population evolution of cities is at the core of this science and of all urban studies. Quantitatively, the most…