We investigate how urban concentration and urbanization affect economic growth in developing countries. Using semi-parametric estimation techniques on a cross-country panel of 39 countries for the years 1960-1990 we discover a U-shaped relationship for urban concentration. This suggests the...

In a simple urban economics framework, we aim at highlighting how the trade-off between optimal and equilibrium city size behaves when introducing dynamic human capital externalities beside the classical congestion externalities. Our purpose is to show that there are dynamic gains from oversized...

I derive poverty indices taking into account both the absolute and relative aspects of income well-being. The trade-off made by the social planner between those two aspects is captured at individual level by a well-being ordering. This ordering evaluates the well-being of an agent based on her...

Regions can benefit by offering infrastructure services that are differentiated. Competition between regions over potential investors is then less direct, allowing them to realize greater benefits from external investors. The two polar cases of full and incomplete information about investors'...

Regions can benefit by offering infrastructure services that are differentiated. Competition between regions over potential investors is then less direct, allowing them to realize greater benefits from external investors. The two polar cases of full and incomplete information about investors'...

We investigate an economic geography model in which agricultural goods are costly to transport and in which manufactures hire labor from the local agricultural sector as unskilled labor. We show that agricultural transport costs and local-unskilled labor requirements in firms act as a dispersion...

This paper investigates the impact of the heterogeneity of the labor force on the spatial distribution of activities. This goal is achieved by applying the tools of discrete choice theory to an economic geography model. We show that taste heterogeneity acts as a strong dispersion force. We also...

Since Collier and Hoeffler (1998, 2004), it has been supported that inequality, measured at national level, does not affect the risk of conflict. Based on a renewed theoretical framework, the purpose of the paper is to explore the role of inequality in localized conflicts. We argue that previous...

We investigate the role that climatic change has played in the pattern of urbanization in sub- Saharan African countries compared to the rest of the developing world. To this end we assemble a cross-country panel data set that allows us to estimate the determinants of urbanization. The results...