It has been widely observed that China is under-urbanized. The central government has tried to use various policies to promote urbanization. In this paper, we evaluate one of these policies – count-to-city upgrading. Under China’s hierarchical governance structure, a city status can only be...

This paper examines city formation in a country whose urban population is growing steadily over time, with new cities required to accommodate this growth. In contrast to most of the literature there is immobility of housing and urban infrastructure, and investment in these assets is taken on the...

The evolution of city growth is usually studied for relatively short time periods. The rise and decline of cities is, however, typically a process that takes many decades or even centuries. In this paper we study the evolution of Italian cities over the period 1300-1861. The first contribution...

The paper estimates the local effects of urban regeneration policies by using evidence from interventions that took place in small and medium-sized cities in the Centre and North of Italy over the period 2008-12. By using an Oaxaca-Blinder reweighting estimator, we find little support for the...

Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains. What explains the formation and decay of clusters of creativity? We match data on notable individuals born in Europe between the XIth and the XIXth century with historical city data. The production and...