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...

Our purpose is to investigate how the interplay between trade, commuting and communication costs shapes the economy at both the interregional and intra-urban levels. Specifically, we study how economic integration affects the internal structure of cities and show how decentralizing the...

The Henry George Theorem (HGT), or the golden rule of local public finance, states that, in first-best economies, the fiscal surplus, defined as aggregate land rents minus aggregate losses from increasing returns to scale activities, is zero at optimal city sizes. We derive a general second-best...

We propose a quantity-based 'dual' version of the gravity equation that yields an estimating equation with both cross-sectional interdependence and spatially lagged error terms. Such an equation can be concisely estimated using spatial econometric techniques. We illustrate this methodology by...

New economic geography focuses on the impact of falling transport costs on the spatial distribution of activities. However, it disregards the role of technological innovations, which are central to modern economic growth, as well as the role of migration costs, which are a strong impediment to...