Around the world, national governments as well as international organization measure and monitor performance of large cities and the Quality of Life (QoL) of urban residents, to gain insights into the well-being of the citizens and the state of various amenities at city level and make informed...

Revealing spatially varying relationships between urban growth patterns and underlying determinants is important for better understanding local dimensions of urban development. Through a case study of Nanjing, China, we employ both global and local logistic regressions to model the probability...

We try to combine theory with empirical analysis to investigate the drivers of spatial growth processes, welfare and disparities in a context in which people are markedly immobile. Drawing on two of our recent papers (Cheshire and Magrini, 2006 and 2008), we review the evidence on the drivers of...

This paper aims at economic analysis of economic globalization and urban growth of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, as they are related to ICT sector. Overall analyses offer new insights and evidences for ICT sector as a major contributor for degree of economic globalization and urban...

In light of the United Nations' (UN) latest urbanization projections, par- ticularly with respect to India and the People's Republic of China, a good understanding is needed of what drives aggregate urbanization trends. Yet, previous literature has largely neglected the issue in favor of...

How do people and firms choose to relocate to new cities? We argue that this difficult yet consequential choice is often poorly made, or not made at all, resulting in under-mobility and consequent losses in individual utility and aggregate social welfare. We propose a behavioral economic theory...

This paper reviews the literature on the forces driving urbanization in developing countries. It presents a model outlining how globalization can lead to the evolution of an urban structure which may approximate Zipf's law. Policy implications are outlined. -- urbanization ; globalization ;...

This paper presents an overview of how health outcomes vary across cities in Latin America and discusses some of the known drivers of this variation. There are large disparities in outcomes across cities and across neighborhoods of the same city. Because health is closely related to the...

The importance of cities to economic dynamism and growth cannot be emphasized enough. It is crucial for our understanding of what drives economic growth to understand how cities emerge, develop and prosper. This paper investigates the emergence of cities from a spontaneous order and urban...

The purpose of this exploratory study is to attempt to identify particular public policies which have the potential to increase the economic viability of smaller metropolitan areas and cities. We identify characteristics associated with smaller metro areas that performed better-than-expected...