This paper investigates the urbanization of the Indian manufacturing sector by combining enterprise data from formal and informal sectors. We find that plants in the formal sector are moving away from urban and into rural locations, while the informal sector is moving from rural to urban...

Building on the OECD’s Better Life Initiative and new work using geospatial analysis, this paper investigates how reported life satisfaction relates to some of the urban structure indicators. To this end, it merges OECD household survey data with urban structure data from OECD’s Metropolitan...

This paper describes MOLES 1.0, an integrated land-use and transport model developed with Object-Oriented Programming principles in order to combine selected characteristics from Spatial Computable General Equilibrium and microsimulation models.

Populations of many countries are expected to decrease rapidly, with a simultaneous increase in the proportion of elderly people. These population dynamics will affect residential location patterns of young and old people because of their different preferences for local (zonal) amenities. Using...

This paper numerically evaluates the efficiency of regulations on building size and city size in a congested closed city by comparing welfare gain with that achieved under a first-best toll regime. Results show that whereas the urban growth boundary (UGB) is a poor substitute for the toll regime...

Motivated by several empirical studies showing a positive relationship between residential density and vehicle fuel efficiency chosen by the residents, this paper presents a modified monocentric city model with endogenous vehicle-typechoices. Consumers are assumed to explicitly consider driving...

Optimality of urban density regulations differs between a closed city and an open city. We demonstrate, by examining optimal floor area ratio (FAR) regulation, how to control building size to mitigate traffic congestion externality in a monocentric city. Results show that a closed city requires...

What determines the distributions of skills, occupations, and industries across cities? We develop a theory to jointly address these fundamental questions about the spatial organization of economies. Our model incorporates a system of cities, their internal urban structures, and a...

This handbook chapter studies the theoretical micro-foundations of urban agglomeration economies. We distinguish three types of micro-foundations, based on sharing, matching, and learning mechanisms. For each of these three categories, we develop one or more core models in detail and discuss the...

We study urbanization and rural industrialization in a setting involving one urban region (U) and one rural region (R). Farmers are heterogeneous in their attitude toward migration, while firms' efficiency is higher in U than in R because agglomeration economies have been built in U. Farmers...