The size distribution of cities in many countries follows some broadly regular patterns. Any good theory of city size distributions should (i) be able to account for this regularity, but also (ii) rely on a plausible economic mechanism and (iii) be consistent with other fundamental features of...

Debates about urban growth and change often center on specialization.However, arguments linking specialization to metropolitan economic development contain diverse, and sometimes conflicting, claims. Is it better to be highly specialized or diversified? Does specialization refer to the absolute...

Rocketing rents in urban areas are likely explained by agglomeration economies. This paper measures the impact of these external economies on commercial property values using unique micro�]data on commercial rents and employment. A measure of agglomeration is employed that is continuous over...

This paper investigates whether the geographic distribution of manufacturing activities depends on the size of plants. Using Italian data, we find, as in Kim [Kim, S., 1995. Expansion of markets and the geographic concentration of economic activities: the trends in U.S. regional manufacturing...

We document and then develop a model explaining and relating changes in firms'' organisation and in urban structure. Sharing of business services by headquarters and of sector-specific intermediates by production plants within a city reduces costs, while congestion increases with city size. A...

The paper decomposes a geographical concentration index to examine the temporal scope of a spillover, which is the period of time over which one firm’s activity directly affects the location of other firms’ activities. Natural advantages are fixed over reasonably long time periods, but if...

Thomas Friedman (2005, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) argues that the expansion of trade, the internationalization of firms, the galloping process of outsourcing and the possibility of networking are creating a ‘flat...

This paper examines census-derived commuting data for the world’s earliest major urbanindustrial region, now home to 10 million people. Owing its origins to water power from the Pennine rivers, this region now comprises many closely-spaced cities and towns whose distinct identities have been...

To analyze the mutually dependent relationship between local economic performance and the demand for and supply of transport services, we employ the structural panel VAR method that is popular in the macroeconomic literature, but which has not previously been applied to the modeling of...

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...