Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 7-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Trade and Circuses: Explaining Urban Giants

Trade and Circuses: Explaining Urban Giants Abstract Using theory, case studies, and cross-country evidence, we investigate the factors behind the concentration of a nation's urban population in a single city. High tariffs, high costs of internal trade, and low levels of international trade increase the degree of concentration. Even more clearly, politics (such as the degree of instability) determines urban primacy. Dictatorships have central cities that are, on average, 50 percent larger than their democratic counterparts. Using information about the timing of city growth, and a series of instruments, we conclude that the predominant causality is from political factors to urban concentration, not from concentration to political change. * We are grateful to Alberto Alesina, Olivier Blanchard, Glenn Ellison, Antonio Fatás, Eric Hanushek, Vernon Henderson, Paul Krugman, Norman Loayza, Aaron Tornell, and seminar participants at Harvard University; the University of Rochester; the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University; the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago; the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; and the World Bank for helpful suggestions. We are particularly grateful to Andrei Shleifer for his advice and encouragement. Greg Aldrete provided extremely useful insights on Roman history. Both authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation. This content is only available as a PDF. © 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Quarterly Journal of Economics Oxford University Press

Trade and Circuses: Explaining Urban Giants

Download PDF
33 pages

 
/lp/oxford-university-press/trade-and-circuses-explaining-urban-giants-ZIQOCbTcqQ

References (38)

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN
0033-5533
eISSN
1531-4650
DOI
10.2307/2118515
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract Using theory, case studies, and cross-country evidence, we investigate the factors behind the concentration of a nation's urban population in a single city. High tariffs, high costs of internal trade, and low levels of international trade increase the degree of concentration. Even more clearly, politics (such as the degree of instability) determines urban primacy. Dictatorships have central cities that are, on average, 50 percent larger than their democratic counterparts. Using information about the timing of city growth, and a series of instruments, we conclude that the predominant causality is from political factors to urban concentration, not from concentration to political change. * We are grateful to Alberto Alesina, Olivier Blanchard, Glenn Ellison, Antonio Fatás, Eric Hanushek, Vernon Henderson, Paul Krugman, Norman Loayza, Aaron Tornell, and seminar participants at Harvard University; the University of Rochester; the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University; the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago; the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; and the World Bank for helpful suggestions. We are particularly grateful to Andrei Shleifer for his advice and encouragement. Greg Aldrete provided extremely useful insights on Roman history. Both authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation. This content is only available as a PDF. © 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Journal

The Quarterly Journal of Economics – Oxford University Press

Published: Feb 1, 1995

There are no references for this article.