This paper presents a model of school choice with peer effects and scale economies within schools. Parents` perception of school quality depends on resources and on the characteristics of the student body. A network of local schools of uniform quality will be optimal, even though different...

Little is known about the extent and forces of urban path dependence in developing countries.  Railroad construction in colonial Kenya provides a natural experiment to study the emergence and persistence of this spatial equilibrium.  Using new data at a fine spatial level over one century...

Between the 1870s and World War II, falls in world shipping costs and Western industrialisation gave rise to export-led Southeast Asian growth and specialization in a narrow range of primary commodity exports.  A linked development was the emergence of a few dominant Southeast Asian urban...

Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavorable locations for centuries?  We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanization in Britain,...

The article aims to present and discuss estimates of levels of human and social capital in Italy's regions over the long term, i.e. roughly from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the present day.  The results are linked to newly available evidence for regional value added in order...

Drawing on a new and comprehensive measure of logistics quality, our gravity model suggests logistics in the exporting and partner-country can have an important impact on bilateral exports.  A one standard deviation improvement in the exporter's logistics quality, which for example would...

This working paper analyzes demographic change in Southeast Asia's main cities during and soon after the World War II Japanese occupation.  We argue that two main patterns of population movements are evident.  In food-deficient areas, a search for food security typically led to large net...

This paper evaluates whether immigration can mitigate the Dutch disease effects associated with booms in natural resource sectors.  We derive predicted changes in the size of the non-tradable sector from a small general-equilibrium model a la Obstfeld-Rogoff.  Using data for Canadian...

This paper studies the recent trends in the spatial distribution of economic activity in the United States. Using county-level employment data for 13 sectors - which cover the entire economy - we apply semi-parametric techniques to estimate how agglomeration and congestion effects have changed...

The decline in the importance of tradeable goods production in providing employment has continued in the past decade; distribution, public services and business and financial services all provide more jobs than tradeable goods. Manufacturing output has stagnated under New Labour despite rapid growth...