Geography is widely viewed as the important determinant of city location. This paper empirically disentangles the different roles of geography in shaping the European city system. We present a new database that covers all actual cities as well as potential city locations over the period when the...

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...

We investigate an equilibrium search model in which the search frictions are increasing with the distance to the central business district allowing for on-the-job search and endogenous (monopsony) wage formation and land allocation. We find that there are many different possible outcomes with...

This chapter describes how the spatial distribution of economic activity changes as economies develop and grow. We start with the relation between development and rural-urban migration. Moving beyond the coarse rural-urban distinction, we then focus on the continuum of locations in an economy...

We consider price-fee competition in bilateral oligopolies with perfectly-divisible goods, non-expandable infrastructures, concentrated agents on both sides, and constant marginal costs. We define and characterize stable market outcomes. Buyers exclusively trade with the supplier with whom they...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Annals of Regional Science</I> (2012). Volume 48, issue 2(SI), pages 501-527.<P> This paper addresses the performance of creative firms from the perspective of complex spatial systems. Based on an extensive high-dimensional database on both the...</p></i>

This paper examines the long-run trends in per-capita income across the US states (1929-2005). Our analysis advocates and implements a Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), in order to investigate whether disparities in per-capita income embody a stable long-run relation. The empirical...

This paper aims to provide a conceptual and operational context for analysing regional inequalities. It does so by utilizing a ‘search & matching’ framework. The model, developed in this paper, maps the way in which individuals are distributed according to: 1) the abilities of individuals to...

Large cities produce more output per capita than small cities. This may occur because more talented individuals sort into large cities, because large cities select more productive entrepreneurs and firms, or because of agglomeration economies. We develop a model of systems of cities that...

We review the theoretical links between growth and agglomeration. Growth, in the form of innovation, can be at the origin of catastrophic spatial agglomeration in a cumulative process à la Myrdal. One of the surprising features of the Krugman (1991) model, was that the introduction of partial...