REALLY USEFUL TESTS OF THE MONOCENTRIC MODEL

The models of residential location in urban land markets originally developed by Alonso and Muth have long since established themselves as the foundations of urban economic theory. The fundamental results of the basic model are that the spatial distribution of land and housing prices, consumption of land, and the spatial arrangement of residents are determined by the transportation costs to the central business district (CBD). In particular, the principal qualitative hypotheses which the standard model generates are: the price of land declines with distance from the CBD; and the consumption of land per household increases with distance from the CBD. Prior research, with the exception of Yinger has had great difficulty in verifying predictions of the model, mainly because the data which has been used to test these predictions has not at all conformed to the assumptions used to derive them. In section II, the monocentric model is briefly reviewed, along with the difficulties of verifying its predictions. In any case, a useful test of the monocentric model must arise through the use of data which both contains the variables described by the model, and is gathered from a housing market which conforms as closely as possible to its assumptions. In section III, I describe a data set which does in fact conform very closely to these conditions on both counts. In section IV, the results are presented. Section V concludes. -from Author