Compact Urban Form and Human Development: Retest Based on Heterogeneous Effects

The Human Development Index does not follow a normal distribution. For skewed distributions, finite mixture models can provide better estimates than fixed-effects models. In this paper, the relationship between compact cities and human development is investigated by employing a finite mixture model using panel data of Chinese prefecture-level cities. In contrast to the majority of the literature, which focuses exclusively on economic density, this article examines the impact of economic and morphological density on the level of human development. The results show that the compact development model has a negative impact on the level of human development and that the intensity of the impact varies for cities with different characteristics.