Urban growth models. An application to American cities

The paper proposes and estimates an urban growth model to look at the evolution of the cities of the United States of America from 1790 to 2010. The two questions explored are, first, are there permanent territorial factors that influence the relative size of cities and, second, what role do urban development policies play? To answer these questions, the paper presents a formulation of a city growth model based on economic growth model that relates city size with human, economic, spatial and historical explanatory variables. The model, estimated for 1000-clustered cities of the US, shows that, on the one hand, the adaptation of the economic growth model to a city growth model with spatial interaction variables explain the differentiated evolution of cities and, on the other hand, policies that do not take into consideration the permanent features of the territory can disturb urban sustainability.