The paper discusses the relation between the justly famous Hotelling’s [1929] paper on stability in competition and the corresponding passages of the often ignored Launhardt’s [1885] book, devoted to mathematical economics. Launhardt is sometimes credited for the anticipation of...

Clusters have already been extensively shown to favor firm-level economic performance (productivity, exports, innovation etc.). However, little is known about the capacity of firms in clusters to resist economic shocks. In this paper, we analyze whether firms that agglomerate in clusters and...

The paper discusses the relation between the justly famous Hotelling’s [1929] paper on stability in competition and the corresponding passages of the often ignored Launhardt’s [1885] book, devoted to mathematical economics. Launhardt is sometimes credited for the anticipation of...

This paper explains how road pricing and toll charge theory appeared and evolved on the basis of contributions from the French engineer-economist school, from Dupuit to Allais, and of Anglo-Saxon theories inspired by Pigou and Vickery on decongestion tolls and network tools.

This articles traces a little-known French tradition in spatial economics that was advanced by state engineers who were trained at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and worked for the State Corps engineers. Spurred in part by changes in power technology, especially the advent of the railroad,...

There is an entire branch of industrial location analysis in economics and operational research that refers back to Weber. In this paper I show that the model he developed had already been proposed by W. Launhardt in 1882 as a generalization of a route planning method presented in 1872. It...

This paper aims at providing a possible explanation for the seemingly peripheral role played by spatial economics in modern economic theory. It considers sucessively five points of view according to which space is introduced in economic models and assesses their contributions and limits.

Metropolization is not a new phenomenon : metropolises have been around for centuries. The prime and permanent function of a metropolis is the coordination of economiec activities at a world scale. This function has been applied to different activities in history, depending on technological...

We provide a theory that is able to account for the observed comovement between the shift in intergenerational living arrangements from coresidence to non-coresidence and economic development. Our theory is consistent with the diminution in the status of the elderly documented by some...