A spatial economic theory of the regularities in spatial patterns and size distributions of cities and firms

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25630212
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Civil engineering project/Traffic engineering
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: AKAMATSU Takashi 東北大学, 情報科学研究科, 教授 (90262964)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 土木計画 / 集積立地 / 都市の規模分布 / 企業の規模分布 / 中心地理論

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Statistical distributions of economic activities are known to exhibit a robust regularity called rank-size rule, or Zipf's law. This study shows that rank-size rule of city size distribution emerges as an equilibrium outcome of a multi-industry spatial competition model with agglomeration economies, along with another well-known regularity, urban hierarchy principle. We then demonstrate that the distribution of firm size also obeys rank-size rule if the degree of heterogeneity of firms and industries (variance in the distribution of a parameter representing the heterogeneity) are larger than some threshold..

Free Research Field

土木計画学・交通工学