Optimal Central Place Hierarchies: A Dynamic Programming Approach
2008/11/04
研討會日期 : 2008-11-04
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : 許文泰助理教授
地點 : B棟110室
演講者簡介 : 許文泰教授為美國明尼蘇達大學(University of Minnesota)經濟學博士(2008)。目前為香港中文大學經濟系助理教授。其主要研究領域為應用個體經濟、都市與區域經濟學及產業經濟學。
演講摘要 : Central place theory is a key building block of economic geography and it describes how a hierarchical city system with different layers of cities serving different sized market areas forms from a uniformly populated space. This paper provides a formal economic theory of optimal central place hierarchy, and it also compares the optimal hierarchy with the equilibrium hierarchy in Hsu (2008). The main force driving the size difference of cities is the tradeoff between transportation cost and scale economies, which differs across goods due to different fixed costs of production. Similar to Hsu (2008), the optimal hierarchy also matches two empirical regularities regarding size distribution of cities and industrial locations, that is, Zipf's law and the NAS rule.
