Talk:Cities
- Observing the evolution of city sizes provides us with arguably one of the best measures of economic development in pre-industrial times. Cities were the centers of learning, of political administration, and of economic activity. Books were printed in cities, artisans produced their tools and goods in cities, peasants came to cities to exchange their agricultural produce. In a Malthusian world in which population growth reacts to economic conditions, or in a model with unlimited supply of labor from the countryside, improvements in urban total factor productivity should be reflected in city sizes.
- Cantoni, D. (2015), “The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber Hypothesis in the German Lands”, Journal of the European Economic Association, 13(4): p. 571.
- Paul Bairoch (1977, 1988) and Jan de Vries (1984) were among the first scholars to illustrate the links between city sizes and economic development. A wide variety of papers in the economics and economic history literature have subsequently used their data sets of city sizes, and showed how likely determinants of long-run economic development affect the growth of cities. For example, DeLong and Shleifer (1993) find that more representative forms of government (oligarchies rather than autocratic princes) had a positive impact on urban growth in the medieval and early modern periods. Relatedly, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005) have shown that those European cities that could engage in trade relationships with the colonies across the Atlantic grew faster in the period after 1500.
- Cantoni, D. (2015), “The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber Hypothesis in the German Lands”, Journal of the European Economic Association, 13(4): p. 571.