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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.
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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

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References

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