Overview
This project focuses on the economies in which urban agglomeration is a typical form of economic location, and develops both reduced-form regression and structural model-based frameworks for studying population and industrial agglomerations as well as the associated interregional trade structure based on many-industry and many-region models of economic agglomeration. As for the reduced-form regression approach, we verify the usefulness of the framework by applying it primarily to the Japanese data with a focus on the impact of the development of the high-speed transportation network. For the analysis of interregional trade, besides the factors accruing from endogenous agglomeration force, our regression framework explicitly quantifies the taste heterogeneity across regions accruing from historical and cultural background using household expenditure and historical dialect data. For the structural-model based approach, we utilize the recent results from population game and operations research for equilibrium selection, and adopt a Monte-Carlo simulations to characterize the qualitative properties of stable equilibria. In particular, we will qualitatively replicate the observed size and spatial distributions of urban and industrial agglomerations purely from the theoretical model.
January 7, 2019 - June 30, 2021
