An Energy-centric Theory of Agglomeration

This paper sets out a simple spatial model of energy exploitation to ask how the lo-cation and productivity of energy resources affects the distribution of economic activityacross geographic space. By combining elements from energy economics and economicgeography we link the productivity of energy resources to the incentives for economicactivity to agglomerate. We fnd a novel scaling law links the productivity of energyresources to population sizes, while rivers and roads effectively magnify productivity.We show how our theory's predictions concerning a single core, aggregate to predictionsover regional landscapes and city size distributions at the country level.