This paper provides a detailed account of Hong Kong on the eve of its reintegration into China as a special administrative region. It analyzes recent economic development and provides a clear overview of Hong Kong's economic, financial, institutional, and political circumstances, as well a brief...

This paper studies urban sustainability from the perspective ofexternalities. We develop a general spatialequilibrium model of a monocentric city, in which two types ofexternalities occur. On the one hand, pollution inthe industrial centre leads to a spatially differentiateddeterioration of the...

Following Max Weber, many theories have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With its religious heterogeneity, the Holy Roman Empire presents an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. Using population figures of 272 cities in the years 1300–1900, I find...

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. Our statistical framework uses light growth to supplement existing income growth measures. The framework is applied to countries with...