Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T22:23:39.779Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

William Alonso, Richard Muth, Resources for the Future, and the Founding of Urban Economics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

John F. McDonald
John F. McDonald
Affiliation:
Center for Urban Real Estate, College of Business Administration, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Frequent reference is made to the Alonso-Muth model of the urban land and housing markets, and the creation of this model often is considered to be the founding act in the field of urban economics. One purpose of this paper is to examine closely the original writings of these two distinguished authors, William Alonso and Richard Muth, and to show that their contributions to the development of the model were not identical. Both authors focused on the idea that there is a trade-off between access to a central point (for employment) and the price of residential land or housing, but their models were designed to serve somewhat different purposes. A second objective of this paper is to evaluate the proposition that theirs was indeed the founding act in the field by concentrating on the earliest versions of their work on the model, rather than on the enormous literature that followed. See Masahisa Fujita (1989) for a comprehensive treatment of the subsequent theoretical literature that was stimulated by Alonso and Muth.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 67 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Alonso, William (1960a) A Model of the Urban Land Market: Location and Densities of Dwellings and Businesses (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania).Google Scholar
Alonso, William (1960b) A Theory of the Urban Land Market, Papers and Proceedings, Regional Science Association, 6, pp. 149–57.Google Scholar
Alonso, William (1964) Location and Land Use (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Becker, Gary (1965) A Theory of the Allocation of Time, Economic Journal, 75 (299), pp. 493–517.Google Scholar
Becker, Gary, and Robert, Michael (1973) On the New Theory of Consumer Behavior, Swedish Journal of Economics, 75 (4), pp. 378–95.Google Scholar
Beckmann, Martin (1957a) On the Distribution of Rent and Residential Density in Cities, Paper presented at the Interdepartmental Seminar in Mathematical Applications in the Social Sciences (New Haven CT: Yale University), Vol. 19, No. 1.Google Scholar
Beckmann, Martin (1957b) On the Equilibrium Distribution of Population in Space, Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 19, pp. 81–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckmann, Martin, and Richard, Muth (1956) An Inventory Policy for a Case of Lagged Delivery, Management Science, 2 (2), pp. 145–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckmann, Martin, and Richard, Muth (1957) On the Two-Bin Inventory Policy: An Application of the Arrow-Harris-Marschak Model, Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper No. 25.Google Scholar
Brueckner, Jan (1982) A Note on Sufficient Conditions for Negative Exponential Densities, Journal of Regional Science, 22 (3), pp. 353–59.Google Scholar
Clark, Colin (1951) Urban Population Densities, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 114 (4), pp. 490–96.Google Scholar
Court, Andrew (1939) Hedonic Price Indexes with Automotive Examples, The Dynamics of Automobile Demand (New York: General Motors).Google Scholar
Fujita, Masahisa (1989) Urban Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Griliches, Zvi (1961) Hedonic Price Indexes for Automobiles: An Econometric Analysis of Quality Change, in The Price Statistics of the Federal Government, No. 73 (Washington, DC: USGPO).Google Scholar
Hoover, Edgar, and Vernon, Raymond (1959) Anatomy of a Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Kim, Kyung-Hwan, and McDonald, John (1987) Sufficient Conditions for Negative Exponential Densities: A Further Analysis, Journal of Regional Science, 27, pp. 295–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lancaster, Kelvin (1966) A New Approach to Consumer Theory, Journal of Political Economy, 74 (2), pp. 132–57.Google Scholar
McDonald, John (1979) Economic Analysis of an Urban Housing Market (New York, NY: Academic Press).Google Scholar
Mills, Edwin (1967) An Aggregative Model of Resource Allocation in a Metropolitan Area, American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 57, (2), pp. 197–210.Google Scholar
Mills, Edwin (1972) Studies in the Structure of the Urban Economy (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future).Google Scholar
Muth, Richard (1958) The Demand for Non-Farm Housing (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago).Google Scholar
Muth, Richard (1960) The Demand for Non-Farm Housing, in Harberger, Arnold (Ed), The Demand for Durable Goods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Muth, Richard (1961a) Economic Change and Rural-Urban Land Conversion, Econometrica, 29 (1), pp. 1–29.Google Scholar
Muth, Richard (1961b) The Spatial Structure of the Housing Market, Papers and Proceedings, Regional Science Association, 7 (1), pp. 207–20.Google Scholar
Muth, Richard (1966) Household Production and Consumer Demand Functions, Econometrica, 34 (3), pp. 699–708.Google Scholar
Muth, Richard (1969) Cities and Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Muth, Richard (1971) The Derived Demand for Urban Residential Land, Urban Studies, 8 (2), pp. 243–54.Google Scholar
Muth, Richard (1979) This Week's Citation Classic, Citation Classic Number 49, 12 3.Google Scholar
Perloff, Harvey, and Wingo, Lowdon (Eds) (1968) Issues in Urban Economics (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future).Google Scholar
Ricardo, David (1821) On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London: Everyman Library, 1963).Google Scholar
Rosen, Sherwin (1974) Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Product Differentiation in Pure Competition, Journal of Political Economy, 82 (1), pp. 34–55.Google Scholar
Shephard, Stephen (1999) Hedonic Analysis of Housing Markets, in Cheshire, Paul and Mills, Edwin (Eds) Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, Vol. 3 (Amsterdam: North Holland).Google Scholar
Thompson, Wilbur (1965) A Preface to Urban Economics (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future).Google Scholar
Thorsnes, Paul (1997) Consistent Estimates of the Elasticity of Substitution between Land and Non-Land Inputs in the Production of Housing, Journal of Urban Economics, 42 (1), pp. 98–108.Google Scholar
von Thünen, Johann (1826) Isolated State, Wartenberg, C. (Trans) (New York, NY: Pergamon Press, 1966).Google Scholar
Waugh, F. V. (1929) Quality as a Determinant of Vegetable Prices (New York: Columbia University Press).Google Scholar
Wingo, Lowdon (1961) Transportation and Urban Land (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future).Google Scholar