Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Andres Gomez-Lievano
Author-Email: Andres_Gomez@hks.harvard.edu
Author-Workplace-Name: Center for International Development at Harvard University
Author-Name: Oscar Patterson-Lomba
Author-Workplace-Name: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Author-Name: Ricardo Hausmann
Author-Email: ricardo_hausmann@harvard.edu
Author-Workplace-Name: Harvard's Growth Lab
Author-Person: pha552
Title: Explaining the Prevalence, Scaling and Variance of Urban Phenomena
Abstract: The prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size. We
 propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity, and cultural evolution to
 derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in scaling exponents and average prevalence across phenomena, as well as the difference in the variance within phenomena across cities of similar size. The central ideas are that a number of necessary complementary factors must be simultaneously present for a phenomenon to occur, and that the diversity of factors is logarithmically related to population size. The model reveals that phenomena that require more factors will be less prevalent, scale more superlinearly and show larger variance across cities of similar size. The theory applies to data on education, employment, innovation, disease and crime, and it entails the ability to predict the prevalence of a phenomenon across cities, given information about the prevalence in a single city.
Creation-Date: 2016-12
Keywords: urban phenomena
Number: 89
Handle: RePEc:glh:wpfacu:89
File-Url: http://growthlab.cid.harvard.edu/files/growthlab/files/urban_phenomena_cidwp329.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf