Professional diversity and the productivity of cities.

ABSTRACT: Attempts to understand the relationship between diversity, productivity and scale have remained limited due to the scheme-dependent nature of the taxonomies describing complex systems. We analyze the diversity of US metropolitan areas in terms of profession diversity and employment to show how this frequency distribution takes a universal scale-invariant form, common to all cities, in the limit of infinite resolution of occupational taxonomies. We show that this limit is obtained under general conditions that follow from the analysis of the variation of the occupational frequency across taxonomies at different resolutions in a way analogous to finite-size scaling in statistical physical systems. We propose a theoretical framework that derives the form and parameters of the limiting distrib

SUBMITTER: Bettencourt LM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4066264 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature