2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Basic Study on the Mechanisms of the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity

Research Project

Project/Area Number	24830025
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	Applied economics
Research Institution	The University of Tokyo
Principal Investigator	NAGAMACHI Kohei 東京大学, 経済学研究科(研究院), 助教 (10632284)
Project Period (FY)	2012-08-31 – 2014-03-31
Keywords	都市規模分布 / 都市の階層性 / task trade
Research Abstract	The followings are abstracts of four research projects I have conducted. (1) I derived a relationship between the economy-wide productivity and city-level and industry-level productivities, which allows us to decompose the macro-level growth dynamics into city-level or industry-level growth dynamics. (2) I showed that land as a fixed input of production is important in explaining the spatial sorting of knowledge workers. (3) I introduced task trade between regions into the urban economic analysis and theoretically identified the mechanism of specialization of multiple cities in different stages of production. Using a U.S. dataset, it was verified that the model's predictions are valid. (4) I built a computationally feasible model that is suitable for an analysis on the effects of information and communication technology and computerization on urban hierarchy.