I recently had the pleasure of writing a blog post for the London School of Economic’s US Centre Blog. It covers a recent publication in State and Local Government Review on the implications of overlapping local governments on local public employment in the US. You can find more information about this piece here. See below for the full text of the post as well as a link to the original.

Zipf’s law is a constant curiosity for urban observers. According to the law, the size of a city (i.e. population) is inversely related to the city’s population rank. This implies that the largest city is twice as large as the second largest city, three times as large as the third largest city, and so on.

Full color, stylized maps created for my working paper on local political fragmentation and economic growth. These three maps examine long-run (1960-2000) growth in population, employment, and per capita money income among 314 U.S. metropolitan areas.

Created in R with ggplot2. Full code and data can be found here.

Created in R with ggplot2. The relevant code is below.