City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. One popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a...

A growing body of theoretical contributions and empirical studies has explored how the spatial distribution of public resources and governmental transfers is likely to be driven by efficiency and equity, as well as by political considerations. This article applies this line of research to...

This study examines intra-regional disparity and municipal merger in Fukuoka Prefecture. Fukuoka Prefecture (Fukuoka-ken) is a prefecture of Japan located on Kyushu Island. It faces the sea on three sides, bordering on Saga, Oita, and Kumamoto prefectures and facing Yamaguchi Prefecture across...

In this article, we quantitatively analyze changes in the size distribution of municipal jurisdictions in Japan by using their rank-size distribution to capture the change. In Japan, the central government sometimes enacts large-scale municipal mergers, aimed at the creating of municipalities of...

There is a substantial heterogeneity in productivity when comparing individual firms. However, even when heterogeneity is found, some questions still remain unaddressed. For instance, when focusing on EU nothing is known about the importance of firms' heterogeneity compared with that of...

We study the determinants of agglomeration of Canadian manufacturing industries from 1990 to 2009. In so doing, we revisit the seminal contribution by Rosenthal and Strange (2001, "The determinants of agglomeration", J Urban Econ 50(2), 191?229) using a long panel and continuous measures of...

This paper aims to identify the contribution of knowledge capital and its determinant - human capital - to total factor productivity differences among regions within a regression framework in general and the impact of their spillovers on regional total factor productivity in particular. The...

We study the link between air accessibility (measured by non-stop flights offer) and the manufacturing export of the Italian regions in Europe using a panel of 12,000 half-yearly observations ranging from 1998 to 2010. The analysis shows that the supply of non-stop flights provided by...

Although clusters life cycles tend to co-evolve with the life cycle of its dominant industry (Bergman, 2008; Menzel and Fornahl, 2010), the stylized life cycle model does not capture the full complexity of cluster evolution (Martin and Sunley, 2011). Empirical studies indicate that clusters do not...

It is well known that exporters are productive firms. But the source of their productivity is left unexplained. This paper aims to endogenize the productivity heterogeneity of exporting firms by incorporating innovation in a structural model framework. In doing so, we close the gap between the...