Prime Locations
75 Pages Posted: 2 Dec 2020 Last revised: 27 May 2022
There are 2 versions of this paper
Date Written: November 2020
Abstract
We harness big data to detect prime locations-large clusters of knowledge-based tradable services-in 125 global cities and track changes in the within-city geography of prime service jobs over a century. Prime services are less spatially concentrated and prime locations are farther away from historic cores in historically smaller cities that did not develop early public transit networks. We rationalize these novel stylized facts empirically and theoretically. External returns to scale give rise to multiple equilibria in the city-internal distribution of prime services. The resilience of historic prime locations in historically large cities originates at least partially from endogenous durable transport networks.
Keywords: granular spatial model, internal city structure, multiple equilibria and path dependence, Prime services, transport networks
JEL Classification: R38, R52, R58
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