We investigate whether an aging population may challenge the supremacy of large working-cities. To this end, we develop an economic geography model with two types of individuals (workers and retirees) and two sectors (local services and manufacturing). Workers produce and consume; the elderly...

The objective of this Paper is to apply different welfare approaches to the canonical model developed by Krugman, with the aim of comparing the only two possible market outcomes, i.e. agglomeration and dispersion. More precisely, we use the potential Pareto improvement criteria, as well as the...

There is a large consensus among international institutions and national governments to favor urban-containment policies - the compact city - as a way to improve the ecological performance of the urban system. This approach overlooks a fundamental fact: what matters for the ecological outcome of...

We study how political boundaries and fiscal competition interact with the labor and land markets to determine the economic structure and performance of metropolitan areas. Contrary to general belief, institutional fragmentation need not be welfare-decreasing, and commuting from the suburbs to...

We study the impact of falling trade costs and falling national transport costs on the economic geography of countries involved in an integration process. Two regions between which labour is mobile form each country, but there is no international factor mobility. Commodities can be traded both...

The aim of this paper is to qualify the claim that regulating a competitive transport sector is always detrimental to consumers. We show indeed that, although transport deregulation is beneficial to consumers as long as the location of economic activity is fixed, this is no longer true when, in...

We analyse how the interplay between urban costs, wage wedges and trade costs may affect the inter-regional location of firms as well as the intra-urban location, within the central business district or in a secondary employment centre (SEC) of the selected region. In this way we investigate, on...

The EU policy against harmful tax competition aims at eliminating tax policies targeted at attracting the internationally mobile tax base. We examine this issue by considering two countries which decide their corporate tax rates their tax regimes (discriminatory or non-discriminatory tax...

This paper analyzes the relationship between crime and agglomeration where the land, labor, product, and crime markets are endogenously determined. We show that in bigger cities there is relatively more crime, a standard stylized fact of most cities in the world. We also show that, in the short...

Our aim is to explain how a small country can be viable as an international banking center (IBC). We build a model in which mobile investors choose between two banking centers located respectively in a small country and in a large country. These countries compete in two instruments, taxation and...