Urban Economics Glossary

Productivity advantages from the geographic concentration of economic activity, including knowledge spillovers, labor pooling, and shared inputs.

A curve showing the maximum rent a user will pay at each distance from the city center.

The reflection of amenities or disamenities in property values.

The traditional commercial and business center of a city with the highest land values and density.

Christaller's model explaining the distribution, size, and spacing of cities based on market areas for goods and services.

The total monetary, time, and psychological costs of traveling between home and work.

Fees charged to drivers entering congested areas to internalize social costs of driving.

A suburban concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside the traditional downtown.

A cost or benefit of an economic activity that affects third parties not directly involved in the transaction.

The process by which housing units pass from higher-income to lower-income occupants over time as they age.

Using land-use regulations to attract tax-positive development and exclude costly service demands.

A method decomposing property prices into implicit values of individual attributes.

The responsiveness of new housing construction to changes in price.

Informal transmission of ideas and techniques between nearby economic agents.

The agglomeration benefit of many workers and firms in one location, improving job matching.

A tax on the unimproved value of land, not on buildings or improvements.

The Alonso-Muth-Mills framework with a single CBD determining spatial structure.

Krugman's models explaining spatial concentration through increasing returns, transport costs, and market access.

A metropolitan area with multiple employment and commercial centers rather than a single dominant CBD.

A condition where wage, cost, and amenity differences across locations leave no incentive to relocate.

Households selecting jurisdictions based on preferred public services and tax levels.

Costs of concentration including congestion, pollution, high rents, and crime.

Higher wages earned in larger, denser cities reflecting productivity gains and cost-of-living compensation.

Benefits from city size and diversity (as opposed to localization economies from same-industry clustering).

The empirical regularity that city population is inversely proportional to its rank in the national distribution.