J Lobo
Biographic Data
| ID | 70926 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Lobo |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Lobo |
| SIGNATURE | LOBO J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Arizona State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0814-7168 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 138 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The road to prosperity
In-use stocks capture a core dimension of material well-being by reflecting the tangible conditions of daily life. As such, they form a key component of composite well-being indices and offer a tangible alternative to monetary metrics that can be difficult to compare across regions. In this study, we introduce the cMAC–EEEs (city MAterial Cycles and MAnufactured Capital–Electronic and Electrical Equipment) database—a novel dataset that covers per…
Do Neighborhoods Matter for Individual Decision‐Making? The Case of Covid‐19 Vaccination in Sweden
Much research has highlighted the significance of neighborhood effects on individual‐level choices and outcomes. But it has proven difficult to disentangle the influence of those that an individual shares a residential space with from that of other peers, such as work colleagues and family members. Neighbors, work colleagues, and family members constitute different sources of information. The decision to accept or refuse a vaccine is intensely pe…
Urban scaling theory
Since its start about 15 years ago, urban scaling research has become a vibrant component of the emerging field of urban science. Initially, this work focused on the identification of nonlinear relationships in urban quantities relative to population size, but more recently it has expanded to include efforts to explain observed scaling relationships in terms of new theory. We find that some misunderstandings have arisen in the literature concerni…
Adolescence socioeconomic segregation and high-skill jobs in adulthood
The influence of neighborhood environments on children’s future outcomes has attracted significant scholarly attention in recent years. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining how neighborhood segregation during adolescence affects the likelihood of securing a high-skill occupation in adulthood. Utilizing comprehensive Swedish microdata, we control for intergenerational persistence in labor market outcomes and cognitive abi…
Bureaucrats’ willingness to resist democratic backsliding
Extensive growth of inventions
Food storage, mobility, and the density-dependence of hunter-gatherer movement ecology
Disentangling agglomeration economies from selection under policy distortions in China
This paper explores the competing sources of productivity gains observed in China’s urban agglomerations focusing on three pillar industries: agro-food processing, textiles and electronics. The main results reveal that the higher aggregate productivity observed in denser Chinese cities is driven by both agglomeration and selection forces. Subsequent analysis shows that industrial support policies help to mitigate the selection penalty, but come a…
Urban structure, spatial equilibrium, and social inequality at Ancient Teotihuacan
Agglomeration effects as spatially embedded social interactions
Agglomeration is the tell-tale sign of cities and urbanization. Identifying and measuring agglomeration economies has been achieved by a variety of means and by various disciplines, including urban economics, quantitative geography, and regional science. Agglomeration is typically expressed as the non-linear dependence of many different urban quantities on city size, proxied by population. The identification and measurement of agglomeration effec…
The Impact of Transportation on Pottery Industries in Roman Britain
The distribution of Roman pottery depended on the transportation system which moved it. Here we trace developments in these distributions during the Roman period in Britain to document how the transportation system developed and assess its impact on the island’s economy. We created a database with records from 775 excavations at 652 sites, and data on over two million pottery sherds. By analyzing the changing distributions of pottery from product…
Covid-19 vaccination rates and neighbourhoods
This paper investigates neighbourhood characteristics related to an individual’s likelihood of getting the first COVID-19 vaccination and implementing official recommendations for the three-shot vaccination regime. We use full population-geocoded microdata for Sweden to measure important individual-level attributes and the marginalisation of their residential communities in terms of ethnicity, education and income. The findings show that the like…
Transport Costs and Economic Change in Roman Britain
Reductions in the cost of transporting manufactured goods have been an important element in economic development in the recent past, and previous research suggests that the Roman period in Britain also saw substantial reductions in such costs. The authors investigate how far it is possible to measure changes in transport costs by considering the spatial distributions of pottery from known Roman production locations over time. Their analysis of an…
A systematic approach for studying the persistence of settlements in the past
Some human settlements endure for millennia, while others are founded and abandoned within a few decades or centuries. The reasons for variation in the duration of site occupation, however, are rarely addressed. Here, the authors introduce a new approach for the analysis of settlement longevity or persistence. Using seven regional case studies comprising both survey and excavation data, they demonstrate how the median persistence of individual se…
Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality
One of the most common tendencies of human settlements is for larger settlements to display higher population densities. Work in urban science and archaeology suggests that this densification pattern reflects an emergent spatial equilibrium where individuals balance movement costs with social interaction benefits, leading to increases in aggregate productivity and social interdependence. The temporary camps created by hunters and gatherers exhibi…
As different as night and day
The urban scaling framework views cities as integrated socioeconomic networks of interactions embedded in physical space. A crucial property of cities highlighted by this approach is that cities act to mix populations, a mixing both facilitated and constrained by physical infrastructure. Operationalizing a view of cities as settings for social interactions and population mixing—assembling a set of spatial units of analysis which contain the relev…
Artificial increasing returns to scale and the problem of sampling from lognormals
We show how increasing returns to scale in urban scaling can artificially emerge, systematically and predictably, without any sorting or positive externalities. We employ a model where individual productivities are independent and identically distributed lognormal random variables across all cities. We use extreme value theory to demonstrate analytically the paradoxical emergence of increasing returns to scale when the variance of log-productivit…
Labor flows across firm size, age, and economic sector in Colombia vs. the United States
Provisioning an Early City
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10816-021-09535-5
The Low-Density Urban Systems of the Classic Period Maya and Izapa
The peoples of southern Mesoamerica, including the Classic period Maya, are often claimed to exhibit a distinct type of spatial organization relative to contemporary urban systems. Here, we use the settlement scaling framework and properties of settlements recorded in systematic, full-coverage surveys to examine ways in which southern Mesoamerican settlement systems were both similar to and different from contemporary systems. We find that the po…
Why Archaeology Is Necessary for a Theory of Urbanization
In recent decades researchers in several disciplines have promoted ‘urban science’ to acknowledge the advantages of multidisciplinary approaches and the expanding ability to collect data for contemporary cities. Although practitioners tend to treat the city as the object of study, in our view the more appropriate focus is the process of urbanization. When framed this way, the archaeological record becomes central to a robust theory of urbanizatio…
Increasing returns to scale in the towns of early Tudor England
Urban agglomeration economies make cities central to theories of modern economic growth. There is historical evidence for the presence of Smithian growth and agglomeration effects in English towns c.1450-1670, but seminal assessments deny the presence of agglomeration effects and productivity gains to Early Modern English towns. This study evaluates the presence of increasing returns to scale (IRS) in aggregate urban economic outputs—the empirica…
Settlement scaling theory
A general explanatory framework for the social processes underpinning urbanisation should account for empirical regularities that are shared among contemporary urban systems and ancient settlement systems known throughout archaeology and history. The identification of such shared properties has been facilitated by research traditions in each field that define cities and settlements as areas that capture networks of social interaction embedded in …
Let's stick together
We investigate if there are positive economic effects for individuals residing in ethnic neighborhoods, in particular if the likelihood of labor market participation among foreign-born is affected by residentially aggregating with other people from one's same native region. We also examine to what extent the income level among foreign-born who have a job is affected by the extent to which they congregate in ethnic enclaves. We use Swedish micro-l…
Toward understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on labor
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies have the potential to significantly disrupt labor markets. While AI and automation can augment the productivity of some workers, they can replace the work done by others and will likely transform almost all occupations at least to some degree. Rising automation is happening in a period of growing economic inequality, raising fears of mass technological unemployment and a r…
The Low-Density Urban Systems of the Classic Period Maya and Izapa
The peoples of southern Mesoamerica, including the Classic period Maya, are often claimed to exhibit a distinct type of spatial organization relative to contemporary urban systems. Here, we use the settlement scaling framework and properties of settlements recorded in systematic, full-coverage surveys to examine ways in which southern Mesoamerican settlement systems were both similar to and different from contemporary systems. We find that the po…
Settlement scaling theory
A general explanatory framework for the social processes underpinning urbanisation should account for empirical regularities that are shared among contemporary urban systems and ancient settlement systems known throughout archaeology and history. The identification of such shared properties has been facilitated by research traditions in each field that define cities and settlements as areas that capture networks of social interaction embedded in …
Settlement scaling and economic change in the Central Andes
There is a longstanding debate in anthropology and history regarding the extent to which the determinants of past economic change are similar in any specific ways to those that operate today. In this paper, we examine the extent to which increasing returns to settlement scale in material outputs, which are apparent in contemporary urban systems, also operated in the Late Pre-Hispanic Tarma and Mantaro drainages of the Peruvian Central Andes. Prox…
The Size of Plazas in Mesoamerican Cities and Towns
We present quantitative data on population size and plaza area in three groups of ancient Mesoamerican settlements: a sample of 30 Late Postclassic cities and towns from throughout Mesoamerica and two regional settlement systems from the Classic period, including south-central Veracruz (the Mixtequilla) and the Palenque region. Plaza size scales with population in a sublinear relationship in all three groups, meaning that larger settlements had c…
Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality
One of the most common tendencies of human settlements is for larger settlements to display higher population densities. Work in urban science and archaeology suggests that this densification pattern reflects an emergent spatial equilibrium where individuals balance movement costs with social interaction benefits, leading to increases in aggregate productivity and social interdependence. The temporary camps created by hunters and gatherers exhibi…
Provisioning an Early City
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10816-021-09535-5
Distinguishing neighbourhood and workplace network effects on individual income
Distinguishing neighbourhood and workplace network effects on individual income: evidence from Sweden. Regional Studies. This paper investigates the effects on individuals’ income of two social networks in which individuals are embedded: their residential neighbourhood and their workplace. The paper avails itself of Swedish micro-level data, which make it possible to identify individual workers, and with whom they live next to and work. The spati…
Metropolitan patenting, inventor agglomeration and social networks
A systematic approach for studying the persistence of settlements in the past
Some human settlements endure for millennia, while others are founded and abandoned within a few decades or centuries. The reasons for variation in the duration of site occupation, however, are rarely addressed. Here, the authors introduce a new approach for the analysis of settlement longevity or persistence. Using seven regional case studies comprising both survey and excavation data, they demonstrate how the median persistence of individual se…
Stratification and Spatial Segregation of Human Capital as Determinants of Metropolitan Productivity in the United States
This paper explores the dynamics of how the human capital embodied in metropolitan populations might impact metropolitan productivity. Three aspects of human capital are examined: the average aggregate level of human capital, stratification according to human capital and spatial segregation according to human capital. These are measured for the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the US for 1970, 1980 and 1990, and then tested as explanatory variab…
Constrained pathways to a creative urban economy
Creative (knowledge-intensive) occupations are now widely seen as a basis for urban economic prosperity. Yet the transitional pathways from a city’s current economy to a more creative economy are often difficult to discern or to navigate. Here we use a network perspective of occupational interdependencies to address questions of urban transitions to a creative economy. This perspective allows us to assess alternative pathways and to compare citie…
Unit root tests of sigma income convergence across us metropolitan areas
The standard deviation of metropolitan per capita personal income ( PCPI ) and metropolitan average wage per job ( AWPJ ) provide straightforward indicators of unconditional sigma convergence for metropolitan economies within the United States. Using data for all metropolitan areas in the continental United States for the period 1969–2001, we tested for the unconditional sigma income convergence hypothesis by applying two unit root tests to the t…
Sectoral Shares, Specialisation and Metropolitan Wages in the United States, 1969-96
We investigate the effect of specialisation upon the level of metropolitan wage per worker. Specialisation is measured by the share of metropolitan earnings in each of five traded goods and services sectors. Sectoral specialisations are assumed to be determinants of location-specific productivity, which in turn is treated as a term in a metropolitan production function. Panel data are used for estimating that production function for 313 metropoli…
A Simple Test for Convergence of Metropolitan Income in the United States
The prevalent test for income convergence used in many recent studies of convergence across spatial economic units in the United States is to use a regression equation in which income growth is regressed against the initial level of income (this is known as β convergence). That method, however, has been crtiticized as an instance of Galton's fallacy of regression. We devise a simple test for the income β-convergence hypothesis which does not suff…
Bureaucrats’ willingness to resist democratic backsliding
Transport Costs and Economic Change in Roman Britain
Reductions in the cost of transporting manufactured goods have been an important element in economic development in the recent past, and previous research suggests that the Roman period in Britain also saw substantial reductions in such costs. The authors investigate how far it is possible to measure changes in transport costs by considering the spatial distributions of pottery from known Roman production locations over time. Their analysis of an…
Increasing returns to scale in the towns of early Tudor England
Urban agglomeration economies make cities central to theories of modern economic growth. There is historical evidence for the presence of Smithian growth and agglomeration effects in English towns c.1450-1670, but seminal assessments deny the presence of agglomeration effects and productivity gains to Early Modern English towns. This study evaluates the presence of increasing returns to scale (IRS) in aggregate urban economic outputs—the empirica…
Let's stick together
We investigate if there are positive economic effects for individuals residing in ethnic neighborhoods, in particular if the likelihood of labor market participation among foreign-born is affected by residentially aggregating with other people from one's same native region. We also examine to what extent the income level among foreign-born who have a job is affected by the extent to which they congregate in ethnic enclaves. We use Swedish micro-l…
Extreme events and climate adaptation‐mitigation linkages
It has become increasingly clear that cities will have to simultaneously undertake both adaptation and mitigation in response to accelerating climate change and the growing demands for meaningful climate action. Here we examine the connections between climate mitigation and climate adaptation, specifically, between low‐carbon energy systems and extreme events. The article specifically addresses the question, how do responses to extreme climate ri…
Human capital and per capita product
This article analyzes the extent to which human capital differences can explain the differences in gross state product (GSP) per capita levels between the richer and poorer states of the US. It uses 1990 Census and Bureau of Economic Analysis data on educational attainment, wage levels of different segments of the labor force, and GSP to compare New York – our representative rich state – with the poorest third of the states. The findings indicate…
A Simple Test for Convergence of Metropolitan Income in the United States
The prevalent test for income convergence used in many recent studies of convergence across spatial economic units in the United States is to use a regression equation in which income growth is regressed against the initial level of income (this is known as β convergence). That method, however, has been crtiticized as an instance of Galton's fallacy of regression. We devise a simple test for the income β-convergence hypothesis which does not suff…
Human capital and per capita product
This article analyzes the extent to which human capital differences can explain the differences in gross state product (GSP) per capita levels between the richer and poorer states of the US. It uses 1990 Census and Bureau of Economic Analysis data on educational attainment, wage levels of different segments of the labor force, and GSP to compare New York – our representative rich state – with the poorest third of the states. The findings indicate…
Human capital and per capita product
Stratification and Spatial Segregation of Human Capital as Determinants of Metropolitan Productivity in the United States
This paper explores the dynamics of how the human capital embodied in metropolitan populations might impact metropolitan productivity. Three aspects of human capital are examined: the average aggregate level of human capital, stratification according to human capital and spatial segregation according to human capital. These are measured for the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the US for 1970, 1980 and 1990, and then tested as explanatory variab…
Sectoral Shares, Specialisation and Metropolitan Wages in the United States, 1969-96
We investigate the effect of specialisation upon the level of metropolitan wage per worker. Specialisation is measured by the share of metropolitan earnings in each of five traded goods and services sectors. Sectoral specialisations are assumed to be determinants of location-specific productivity, which in turn is treated as a term in a metropolitan production function. Panel data are used for estimating that production function for 313 metropoli…
Unit root tests of sigma income convergence across us metropolitan areas
The standard deviation of metropolitan per capita personal income ( PCPI ) and metropolitan average wage per job ( AWPJ ) provide straightforward indicators of unconditional sigma convergence for metropolitan economies within the United States. Using data for all metropolitan areas in the continental United States for the period 1969–2001, we tested for the unconditional sigma income convergence hypothesis by applying two unit root tests to the t…
Finding a Voice Through Research
One question guided this experimental study: What impact does the change from teacher training to educational research have on university teachers’ methodology and attitudes to teaching? To find answers to this question, the researchers selected five teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at the language centre of a private university on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia and instructed them in the principles and procedures of action resear…
Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities
Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable developme…
Invention in the city
Metropolitan patenting, inventor agglomeration and social networks
Urban Scaling and Its Deviations
With urban population increasing dramatically worldwide, cities are playing an increasingly critical role in human societies and the sustainability of the planet. An obstacle to effective policy is the lack of meaningful urban metrics based on a quantitative understanding of cities. Typically, linear per capita indicators are used to characterize and rank cities. However, these implicitly ignore the fundamental role of nonlinear agglomeration int…
Are creative metropolitan areas also entrepreneurial?
Does Size Matter? Scaling of CO2 Emissions and U.S. Urban Areas
Urban areas consume more than 66% of the world's energy and generate more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. With the world's population expected to reach 10 billion by 2100, nearly 90% of whom will live in urban areas, a critical question for planetary sustainability is how the size of cities affects energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Are larger cities more energy and emissions efficient than smaller ones? Do larger cities …
Sustainability
Research needs in sustainability encompass a range of topics spanning much of social and behavioral science. Sustainability requires understanding human cognition, capacity to reason and make decisions, capacity for long‐term planning, understanding trade‐offs, risk perceptions, communication techniques, innovation, the consequences of improvements in efficiency, energy and other resources, complexity in problem solving, and other matters. We dis…
Night-Time Light Data
Much research has suggested that night-time light (NTL) can be used as a proxy for a number of variables, including urbanization, density, and economic growth. As governments around the world either collect census data infrequently or are scaling back the amount of detail collected, alternate sources of population and economic information like NTL are being considered. But, just how close is the statistical relationship between NTL and economic a…
Urban scaling in Europe
Over the last few decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using new harmonized definitions for functional urban areas, we examine to what extent these ideas apply to European cities. We show that while most large urban systems in Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Sp…
The ecological and evolutionary energetics of hunter‐gatherer residential mobility
Residential mobility is a key aspect of hunter-gatherer foraging economies and therefore is an issue of central importance in hunter-gatherer studies. Hunter-gatherers vary widely in annual rates of residential mobility. Understanding the sources of this variation has long been of interest to anthropologists and archeologists. The vast majority of hunter-gatherers who are dependent on terrestrial plants and animals move camp multiple times a year…
Settlement scaling and economic change in the Central Andes
There is a longstanding debate in anthropology and history regarding the extent to which the determinants of past economic change are similar in any specific ways to those that operate today. In this paper, we examine the extent to which increasing returns to settlement scale in material outputs, which are apparent in contemporary urban systems, also operated in the Late Pre-Hispanic Tarma and Mantaro drainages of the Peruvian Central Andes. Prox…
Constrained pathways to a creative urban economy
Creative (knowledge-intensive) occupations are now widely seen as a basis for urban economic prosperity. Yet the transitional pathways from a city’s current economy to a more creative economy are often difficult to discern or to navigate. Here we use a network perspective of occupational interdependencies to address questions of urban transitions to a creative economy. This perspective allows us to assess alternative pathways and to compare citie…
Distinguishing neighbourhood and workplace network effects on individual income
Distinguishing neighbourhood and workplace network effects on individual income: evidence from Sweden. Regional Studies. This paper investigates the effects on individuals’ income of two social networks in which individuals are embedded: their residential neighbourhood and their workplace. The paper avails itself of Swedish micro-level data, which make it possible to identify individual workers, and with whom they live next to and work. The spati…
Heterogeneity and scale of sustainable development in cities
Significance Most nations worldwide have recently committed to solving their most severe challenges of sustainability by 2030, including eradicating extreme poverty and providing universal access to basic services. But how? Rapid urbanization is creating the conditions for widespread economic growth and human development, but its consequences are very uneven. We show how measures of sustainable development—identified by residents of poor neighbor…
A comparison of nighttime lights data for urban energy research
Urban areas contribute to about 75% of global fossil fuel CO 2 emissions and are a primary driver of climate change. If greenhouse gas emissions for the top 20 emitting urban areas were aggregated into a one country, it would rank third behind China and the US. With urban areas forecasted to triple between 2010 and 2030 and urban population expected to increase by more than 2.5 billion, sustainable development will require a better understanding …
The Size of Plazas in Mesoamerican Cities and Towns
We present quantitative data on population size and plaza area in three groups of ancient Mesoamerican settlements: a sample of 30 Late Postclassic cities and towns from throughout Mesoamerica and two regional settlement systems from the Classic period, including south-central Veracruz (the Mixtequilla) and the Palenque region. Plaza size scales with population in a sublinear relationship in all three groups, meaning that larger settlements had c…
Toward understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on labor
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies have the potential to significantly disrupt labor markets. While AI and automation can augment the productivity of some workers, they can replace the work done by others and will likely transform almost all occupations at least to some degree. Rising automation is happening in a period of growing economic inequality, raising fears of mass technological unemployment and a r…
Extreme events and climate adaptation‐mitigation linkages
It has become increasingly clear that cities will have to simultaneously undertake both adaptation and mitigation in response to accelerating climate change and the growing demands for meaningful climate action. Here we examine the connections between climate mitigation and climate adaptation, specifically, between low‐carbon energy systems and extreme events. The article specifically addresses the question, how do responses to extreme climate ri…
Economics (39 works) · Geography (33 works) · Economic growth (24 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis (22 works) · Economic geography (20 works) · Population (15 works) · Metropolitan area (14 works) · Demography (13 works) · Archaeology (12 works)