final2021.pdf - Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (32-bit) X File Edit View Sign Window Help Home Tools final2021.pdf X ? A Sign In 2 /3 + 85% Part III - Metropolitan Statistical Areas For data-collection purposes, urban areas of the United States are divided into several hundred "Metropolitan Statistical Areas" based on patterns of residence and commuting; these cut across the boundaries of legal cities and even states. In the last decade, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis has begun to estimate "gross metropolitan products" for these areas. More recently, it has been claimed that these gross metropolitan products show a simple quantitative regularity, called "supra-linear power-law scaling". If Y is the gross metropolitan product in dollars, and N is the number of people in the city, then, the claim goes, Y ~ CNb where the exponent b > 1 and the scale factor c > 0. If this model holds with an exponent b