Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods and data. We survey a range of modelling traditions, and some formal approaches to the ’hard problem’ of regional economics, namely the joint consideration of agglomeration and...

We show in the framework of a new economic geography model that when labor is heterogenous and productivity depends on the quality of the match between job and worker, trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter-industry trade. The agglomeration force is the improvement...

We show in the context of a new economic geography model that when labor is heterogenous trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter-regional trade. Labor heterogeneity gives local monopoly power to firms but also introduces variations in the quality of the job match....

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a subsidy (tax) on urban development in cities in which the marginal-average...

We present a simple model of spatial evolution that avoids several problems that arise with more complex networks of players. We consider a world where pairs of players are matched forever. These players learn from the whole population but they are more likely to learn to strategies used by...

We present two notions of “no arbitrage” in urban economic models and show that there is no model satisfying both. The standard hedonic housing model of urban economics and its generalizations are consistent with the first of these, but inconsistent with the second. We present a model...

This paper analyses patterns of production across 14 industries in 45 regions from 7 European countries since 1975. We estimate a structural equation derived directly from Heckscher- Ohlin theory that relates an industry’s share of a region’s GDP to factor endowments and relative prices....

Foregone benefits of the open space that is sacrificed through urban sprawl are hard to quantify. We obtain a simple benchmark measure by introducing a demand for trips beyond the urban boundary into the monocentric city model. The externality arises from the increase in travel costs that...

Does brownfield redevelopment warrant government support? We explore several external benefits in an urban general equilibrium framework. Preferences are modelled such that demand for housing units in the city is downward sloping, which yields a more general setup than the extreme open and...

We develop a model with a finite number of households and congestable local public goods where the level of provision, the number of facilities and their locations are all endogenously determined. We prove that an equal-treatment identical-provision second-best optimum exists, where all...