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The Size Distribution of Employment Centers within the US Metropolitan Areas

Author

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  • Daniel Arribas-Bel

    (School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, England)

  • Arturo Ramos
  • Fernando Sanz-Gracia

Abstract

This study tackles the description of the size distribution of urban employment centers or, in other words, the size of areas within cities with significantly high densities of workers. Certainly, there exists a branch of urban economics that has paid substantial attention to urban employment centers, but the efforts have been focused on identification methodologies. In this paper we build on such body of research and combine it with insights from the latest contributions in the sister subfield of city size distributions to push the agenda forward in terms of the understanding of these phenomena. We consider the 359 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States in the year 2000 and reach three main conclusions: First, employment center sizes are more unevenly distributed than city sizes; second, the two functions that best describe city size distributions, namely the lognormal and the double Pareto-lognormal, also offer a good fit for the case of centers, particularly the latter; and third, several interesting statistically significant relationships (correlations) between variables related to centers and MSAs are deduced. Further experiments with a different technique of center identification suggest that the results are fairly robust to the method of choice.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Arribas-Bel & Arturo Ramos & Fernando Sanz-Gracia, 2015. "The Size Distribution of Employment Centers within the US Metropolitan Areas," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 42(1), pages 23-39, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envirb:v:42:y:2015:i:1:p:23-39
    DOI: 10.1068/b39038
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Broxterman & Anthony Yezer, 2021. "Human capital divergence and the size distribution of cities: Is Gibrat’s law obsolete?," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(12), pages 2549-2568, September.
    2. Hui Wang & Feng Yuan & Yehua Dennis Wei & Wen Chen & Lei Wang, 2021. "Understanding spatial and compositional dynamics of employment centers in urban China: Empirical evidence from Nanjing," Growth and Change, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 52(4), pages 2635-2661, December.
    3. Robert Manduca, 2021. "The spatial structure of US metropolitan employment: New insights from administrative data," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 48(5), pages 1357-1372, June.
    4. Kevin Kane & John R Hipp & Jae Hong Kim, 2018. "Los Angeles employment concentration in the 21st century," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(4), pages 844-869, March.
    5. John R. Hipp & Jae Hong Kim & Benjamin Forthun, 2021. "Proposing new measures of employment deconcentration and spatial dispersion across metropolitan areas in the US," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 100(3), pages 815-841, June.

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