It has long been argued that economic phenomena are affected by culture. However, the causal effect of cultural ties on economic exchange is difficult to identify, chiefly because cultural ties are endogenous to the current level of economic exchange, and because it is hard to separate culture...

I investigate the effect of transportation improvements on changes in population location patterns in Barcelona between 1991 and 2006. At a much finer geographical scale, I verify and extend the finding of Baum-Snow (2007a) that transportation cause suburbanization: highway and railroad...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between the stock of human capital and productivity in the Spanish regions (NUTS III), and assess whether the transmission channel involves external economies. The empirical evidence points to a positive relationship between the two variables, although...

It is assumed that human capital external economies can increase factor productivity. However, as human capital is accumulated in an unequal way in the territory, productivity improvements will be different among territories. So, in the presence of labour mobility, wage differences will induce...

In this paper, I study long-run population changes across U.S. metropolitan areas. First, I argue that changes over a long period of time in the geographic distribution of population can be informative about the so-called \resilience" of regions. Using the censuses of population from 1790 to...

This paper employs a unique Italian data source to take a comprehensive approach to labor market pooling. It jointly considers many different aspects of the agglomeration labor market relationship, including turnover, learning, matching, and hold up. It also considers labor market pooling from...

The spatial distribution of economic activity is strongly linked to the structure of the urban system. The origin and development of the spatial pattern of this system is separated into two stages, the diffusion of settlements and their potential transition to urban status. The theoretical...

The Zollverein, the 1834 customs union between independent German states, removed all internal borders. This paper investigates its economic impact focussing on urban population growth in the state of Saxony. Implications from a economic geography model are tested with a data set on town...

By raising commuting costs, an increase in gasoline prices should reduce the demand for housing in areas far from employment centers relative to locations closer to jobs. Using annual panel data on a large number of ZIP codes and municipalities from 1981 to 2008, we find that a 10 percent...

In 2000, wages of full time full year workers were more than 30 percent higher in metropolitan areas of over 1.5 million people than rural areas. The monotonic relationship between wages and city size is robust to controls for age, schooling and labor market experience. In this paper, we...