Agglomeration Economies and a Test for Optimal City Sizes in Japan

Dynamic control of rural–urban migration

“…Henderson [3] derived a result that cities under laissezfaire are always larger than the optimal size under the assumption that the benefit of each city is single-peaked in its size. That result has been supported by results of various theoretical and empirical studies of Kanemoto [5] and Kanemoto et al [6] 5 . However, their results mainly addressed the equilibrium sizes of cities; the present study examines growing cities.…”

“…The two sectors input only labor to produce homogeneous output. They differ only in their technologies 6 . In addition, this study subsumes that each sector includes only 5 Their conclusions are not necessarily preserved in a model that consists of only a few cities.…”

Earthquake risk and housing rents: Evidence from the Tokyo Metropolitan Area

“…Following the existing literature on the hedonic pricing approach applied to Japanese cities (for example, Gao and Asami, 2001;Kanemoto and Nakamura, 1986;and Kanemoto et al 1996), we collect the following variables from Recruit (2002) as explanatory variables, thereby controlling for possible effects on housing rents. These include: the walking time (bus time) from home to the nearest station, floor space, building age, the number of floors, and a first floor dummy in addition to a set of dummy variables of types of building and construction materials used as described later.…”

The Henry George Theorem in a second-best world

“…However, our result that the elasticity of the subutility and the relative risk aversion matter for the gap between the first-and the second-best allocations under firm heterogeneity, as well as for comparative static results of equilibria with respect to key variables such as market size, has been recently reconfirmed in different context (see Dhingra and Morrow, 2013, for the former, and Behrens et al, 2014, for the latter). Another direction for future work is the empirical implementation of our results following Kanemoto et al (1996Kanemoto et al ( , 2005. Our more general conditions may be useful to evaluate whether observed city sizes are likely to be too large or too small.…”

“…In a new economic geography (henceforth NEG) model with increasing returns 1 See Mieszkowski and Zodrow (1989) and Arnott (2004) for an overview of the HGT. 2 Kanemoto et al (1996Kanemoto et al ( , 2005 applied these ideas to empirically test the often-made claim that Tokyo, with a metropolitan population of about 30 million, is much too large. It is not easy to obtain reliable estimates of key variables such as the aggregate land rents and the aggregate Pigouvian subsidies in a city, but the HGT provides a promising theoretical framework for empirical studies.…”