Decomposing the urbanisation of employment: a new measure

This paper introduces a new density-based urbanisation index that avoids the spatial methodological issues of existing measures (e.g., modifiable area unit problem, categorisation of locations, exclusion of rural regions, etc.), allows for statistical inference, computes the concentration and size of employment for each sector, and aggregates these numbers additively into the overall degree of urbanisation. The urbanisation index and its decomposition provide a wealth of information. As an illustration, the measure is applied to German sectoral spatial employment data from 1995 to 2014.